One of the best ways to get ahead in your career (and life in general) is to seize the right opportunities. When you do this, you unlock potential you never knew you had while opening doors to growth and advancement.
Kim DeYoung, VP, Digital Technology at Swinerton, knows more than a thing or two about being open to opportunities. She started as an intern at Swinerton 22 years ago and has since moved up the ladder by immersing herself in diverse areas of the business. Today, Kim leads a team of technical and construction professionals and is dedicated to supporting Swinerton's tech initiatives.
In a recent conversation, Kim walks us through her career in construction and shares her thoughts on how firms can use technology wisely, improve team productivity, and drive innovation.
Check out what she has to say below.
Swinerton is a 100% employee-owned national construction company that started in 1888. We've been around a long time. We have about 4,300 employees in 22 offices from Hawaii to New York.
Every employee is an owner, which creates a unique pride and drive in our people to deliver successful projects for our clients. It also allows for a level of innovation you just can't find in a top-down culture. Swinerton builds a diverse list of markets, everything from education to healthcare, residential office, retail, you name it.
We serve our clients by building everything from multi-hundred-million projects to small service-type work that can be done in a day. We also self-perform many trades, which helps us have better control over schedule, construction quality, and cost.
We're also a leader in mass timber sustainable building with our affiliate company, Timberlab, based in Portland, OR.
I've had a passion for building since I was a kid. I was always building new forts in the woods around my home—new and elaborate ones every summer. I also enjoyed drawing and art, so I would draw all sorts of things, including buildings. My grandpa, who I spent a lot of time with growing up, always told me that I would make a great carpenter.
I majored in architecture and construction management at the University of Washington in Seattle. And it turned out architecture was too subjective to me. I would make designs in my studio class that my professor would grade me low on, and I think it was usually because I designed things that were just too practical and they were looking for more creativity.
For me, construction management was more tangible. You have plans and specs to follow, and you're a part of creating something lasting that you can be proud of. Every time I drive by a building that I was a part of, I have a huge sense of pride to this day.
Rising through the ranks resulted from a lot of hard work, having great mentors and advocates for my career, and being open to new opportunities. If you told me 22 years ago that I would be leading construction technology for Swinerton, I would not have believed you.
I like to joke that Swinerton is my only real job. I started as an intern project engineer during my last year of college.
While in the construction management program, I participated in the ASC competition in Reno. Swinerton sponsored the design-build competition, and they still do to this day. Everyone from my school wanted to work for Swinerton. We all thought Swinerton was the coolest, and I was lucky enough to land an internship after my team won the competition.
I was a good student, but I would defer classwork to work more for Swinerton because I really wanted to get hired upon graduating. This was at a time when it was difficult to get a job. It was a different market back then but I ended up with a job offer after graduating.
I spent about eight years in operations in our Seattle division, moving from PE to APM to PM. I experienced everything from healthcare to education and high-rise residential, and I even participated in a design-build project, which was my dream in college.
Our office experienced some challenges, so our core and shell building operations were shut down in Seattle. They're alive and thriving today, but many years ago, we had this downturn, and I was not interested in making tenant improvements (TI). Our TI group was still active, and I was offered the opportunity to become our corporate trainer for all of our project management systems and processes. I did that for a few years, and I really enjoyed making a bigger impact on our organization and our employees.
My shift to technology began when I was asked to lead the business process configurations of our new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. I led a group of about 50 folks from ops to design our processes, covering everything from how we do an request for information (RFI) to change orders and forecasts.
After the ERP implementation, I officially joined our technology team. Today, I oversee teams that deliver our most business-aligned technology aspects, including our construction technology, ERP, and Project Management Operations (PMO) which handles our large technology implementations and merger and acquisitions (M&A) activities. This also includes our business process management program, technology training for all employees, and data analytics teams.
The one that I think has enabled so many other successful initiatives for our technology organization is our transformation from a traditional back-of-house, service-based IT organization to an integrated business technology organization. This happened around ten years ago, and it was a necessary transition because it ensured our technology was more in line with business needs.
In addition to me joining the technology team from operations, we infused our team with a group of talented employees from construction operations to support all of our technology applications.
At this time, we had former superintendents, project managers (PMs), project engineers (PEs), and other project roles join the team. These were people who either had a passion for technology or a passion for supporting people and ensuring that they had the technology they needed to do their jobs.
Our team made sure that we understood business needs and challenges and that we could align all our technology to business goals. Today, we are still sure to keep a fresh operations perspective within our technology teams. At the end of the day, we’re builders, and we need builders to support our tech.
There's a lot of exciting new technologies out there, and a lot of money being invested into technology for the construction industry.
But for me, the questions of where to apply all this emerging tech are the same. It doesn't matter what the tech is. How will it ensure we retain the best employees at Swinerton? Which of these emerging technologies is going to help us build faster using labor efficiently in an industry with a labor shortage? How will we build safer and at a higher quality to meet our business goals?
Again, it doesn't matter what that emerging technology is; if it doesn't answer one of those questions for us, I don't know that it will be in alignment with our needs.
I think AI is the same. How can it help with these same questions? There are a lot of use cases for the productivity of our administrative personnel out there, like the Microsoft Copilot. But the big game changer will be when we can figure out how AI will help us with the persistent labor shortage in construction. In the future, I hope AI will help us build faster, safer, and improve quality.
It's the people. We've had great support from our account team over the years. The executive programs team as well as the product and programming leaders have been great.
I should also mention what I appreciate about the technology. Autodesk is building a platform that covers the whole AEC value chain, and this is a really unique and bold vision. I look forward to seeing how it unfolds in the future.
Today, we are leveraging Autodesk construction tools for all of our quality, safety and document management, and we are also exploring expanding with Autodesk Build platform and moving more to Autodesk Construction Cloud.
A culture of innovation is ingrained into everything we do at Swinerton. It's inherent in our employee ownership culture, so it's just automatic for us.
That being said, we're focusing our innovation efforts on the areas most strategically aligned with our business goals. We're currently working with our executives to ensure our innovation team is laser-focused on the things that will drive the business forward.
Swinerton is really focused on productivity. As a self-performing contractor, the productivity of our field force is one of our most important initiatives. About two years ago, we created a department to solely focus on labor productivity, and this team leverages technology, data, and employee training to help us improve our productivity culture.
They've made a lot of progress in just the two years they've been around in ensuring our field force is as productivity-focused as possible. We're currently creating a roadmap to make major investments in our data and analytics capabilities as well.
We have a ton of data, and we really want to make sure that we can leverage this information to make better decisions around project pursuits, talent development, and project risks. We want to keep our clients better informed of what's happening on their projects.
As a PE, my biggest goal was to become a PM as fast as I could. Now, I really think this was misguided. Looking back, I wish I had been more patient, spent more time with my superintendents, and taken advantage of rotations in the various roles within operations.
As a PE, this is your best opportunity to learn about the construction process and how the pieces and parts come together. So, taking that extra time to understand the field and not being in such a rush to move up, will pay off in the long run.
The second piece of advice I would give is to not limit yourself to the traditional career path in construction and to take advantage of opportunities when they're presented to you.
I never expected that 22 years into my career with Swinerton, I would be overseeing technology. I would've thought that at this point in time, I would've been an operations manager or a division manager within our operations construction group. You may end up with a fulfilling career you didn't expect, and I know that was certainly true for me.
