Job Bidding

Job Bidding

When I was seventeen, I had the chance to work at a job that forever changed my life. I was working for a company in Connecticut called Electrical Contractors Incorporated (ECI) and this job gave me a thorough sense of what the construction world had in store for me. I had a key part in setting up a bid package for the electrical installation for the new UMASS recreation building where I had to do the takeoff, pricing, and go to the bidding meeting for the job. This role of completing these three tasks taught me I was ready for a leadership role in Construction Management.

The first step was to do the takeoff on the blueprints for the electrical setup on the building. As soon as my boss had permission to bid on the job and the blueprints made their way through the door, he thought it would work out the best for the rookie (me) to work on it. Of course, I was going to need some guidance so I worked alongside the soon-to-be general manager, Mark, for the job. When I heard the news, I became as excited as a little kid at Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get started, but I also didn’t know how much work I had ahead of me. I was first sent the detail to complete the takeoff for this three story recreation building. I opened up the blueprints and it looked as if the designer went wild with all the lighting fixtures, outlets, and mechanical switches. They were cluttered all up and down the pages as if he didn’t have a clue at what he was doing. I looked past all that and counted and recounted all of them using colored highlighters and a clicker to keep tally. The takeoff on any building is usually the most time consuming of all the tasks and took me a regular eight hour work day to complete. When I came into work the next day I was met by Mark. He complimented me on how fast I did the takeoff on the job, which made me realize I was fit for this job.

The next step on completing the bid package was to get the pricing for all the materials and figure out if the company was going to sub out the job or needed any equipment to accomplish it. Considering I was working at an electrical contracting company, I knew it had the work force and equipment to accomplish the job. So I set off to do the pricing, giving all the counts of the lighting fixtures and electrical setup to the head of the pricing department. This man’s job was to get quotes on how much the material