Katie Kost: Graduating to a New Level of Leadership

Katie Kost OTI Blog

Anyone who thinks that major construction sites are no place for a woman to spend her professional life should talk to Hoffman Construction Material Manager and Laborer Foreman Katie Kost. She’s found a unique job in the building trades that fits the arsenal of skills she gained in college and in various jobs. Plus, it’s meshed well with her life outside of work. Kost was on the job up until two weeks prior to giving birth to her baby last year.

Not to say that life has been free of challenges. “You have to have tough skin,” says Kost. As a female, “you just have to work hard. It’s not an easy trade. But for me, who has been to college, and wanted to do sports marketing, it’s been great.”

After earning extra money by delivering Domino’s pizzas for $7/hour, Kost graduated from Barlow High School at 18 as a star volleyball player. She received a full ride from North Carolina State to play her sport. She wound up transferring to Portland State her senior year, and left that school with her degree in business management.

After college, Kost wound up working at Lowe’s, then doing inventory at a wholesale auto dealer. She became close friends with a surveyor who had ties to Hoffman Construction, and through the strength of her inventory managing experience, Kost got her first job in that area with the company in 2005.

But Duane Meduna, a Hoffman Superintendent, was impressed by what he saw, and invited Kost to step into the “hybrid job” (as Kost puts it) of Materials Manager/Laborer Foreman. For the position, Kost spends time in the Hoffman offices, but also out on building sites, advising workers on how to keep track of expensive supplies. She’s worked on the concrete crews as well, she says, to get a hands-on feel for the work.

Before Kost got on the job, she says, losses in materials per job could sometimes total $200,000. She’s been able to keep that figure down to $1,000, as was the case when Hoffman worked on Portland’s Cyan Building. “I would say that’s when I gained the most respect,” Kost says, looking back on that project. “She’s a very important part of the job,” affirms Meduna. “When no one is in her position, the guys slowly stop taking care of business”, he says.

One challenge in her position is getting people to recognize her authority as a young woman. “It took a year or two before they’d really listen or respect me,” she says – many of the people whose work she oversees are many decades her senior.  “I’ve learned that you just need to put your foot down,” she reflects when we ask her the secret to gaining respect on the job.

But Kost’s capability is undeniable. She’s praised for her attention to detail, and the precision with which she does her work — her value to the company is well established. Plus, she’d have a hard time going back to a desk job. “I really like being in different places all day, not just sitting behind my computer.”

Cory Naranjo: A Good Fit for Foreman

Corey Naranjo OTI Blog

“If I wasn’t in the trades?” General Foreman Cory Naranjo considers the question as the walkie-talkie affixed to his vest crackles to life. He’s stumped. “I never really considered it,” he concludes. “I’d probably be working an office job, hating life.” Laughter.

It’s true that Naranjo does seem incredibly suited to his leadership role at Hoffman Construction.  He is currently working at the Intel building site Hoffman Construction has been developing in Beaverton and he has spent his entire career in construction at this very company, starting as a Carpenter Apprentice. “I guess that’s a big accomplishment,” he reflects somewhat modestly.

Naranjo had plenty of options when it came to jobs. He got good grades in high school, started working early, at 15 when he did a turn on a summer work crew for the city of Woodland, Washington, where he grew up with his dad, who worked for Weyerhaeuser (and who moved here from Jalisco, Mexico) and mom (who has Italian heritage) who is a registered nurse.

That first summer, he worked at flagging, cleanup, and weeding around the city. But in 2000, when he graduated high school, he was put to work right away in a leadership position as a lead man at General Steel loading trucks.

“It was a lot of responsibility,” he recalls. Maybe that’s why, when he started dating his now-wife Kathleen and her father-in-law impressed upon him the earning potential and the benefits that could be gained from a career in the trades, he reconsidered his plans for higher education. In 2001, he joined a carpentry apprenticeship program at Hoffman.

“I was green – it was interesting,” he says lightly. “You don’t know what you’re getting into until you’re out there doing it. You’re working in all kinds of weather and elements as opposed to sitting in an office all week long.” He learned lots of skills in residential and house building, a big contrast from the large-scale work he’s engaged in when we catch up with him at Intel.

“Hoffman is a good company,” Naranjo says. “We’re like family here. Everyone’s mellow, takes into consideration what’s going on.” He counts as his biggest accomplishment his quick rise to Foreman with the company – his first job as a lead he spent learning alongside Amos Austinson, now working as a Field Superintendent, who Cory credits with teaching him a lot of what he knows. Naranjo’s first turn as foreman he spent working with his friend and teacher on the Waterfront Pearl condos in downtown Portland.

How did Naranjo manage his relatively quick rise up the building trades ladder? He reckons it has to do with being a hard worker and that, “a good leader has to be knowledgeable, willing to listen to the group of workers that you got, willing to admit when you’ve made a mistake.” Now his goal is to be a Superintendent like Austinson.

When asked if he has ever experienced challenges on the job as a man with Latino heritage, Naranjo shrugs. Not personally, he says – though he has seen the obstacles that can come to those for whom English is not their first language. “People kind of get aggravated, and it can play a role in who gets hired.”

But now that Naranjo is a father – Christopher was born to the couple in 2002, with Lily and Olivia quick to follow – the benefits of being in the trades are clear. “I was able to purchase a house when I was 21,” he tells us. His wife is able to be a stay-at-home mom, which he’s proud of. “We have a pretty nice lifestyle – the benefits of hard work pays.”

Dao Dang: Building a life in this country by building skyscrapers

Dao Dang OTI Blog

To see Dao Dang today, striding around the Building Module 2 Intel site, coordinating a team of carpenters for his longtime employers Hoffman Construction, you would never guess that the man moved here from Central Vietnam at age 18 not knowing a word of English. But once you do have an idea of what it took for him to get to where he is today, Dang’s leadership role on his worksite seems even more admirable.

After Dang moved to Oregon with his father and brother, he took a janitorial job at the Oregon Zoo.  After 3 months, he enrolled in a Job Corps carpentry program and learned both English and carpentry at Timer Lake Job Corps Center.

He spent his time alternating between one week of educational program offerings, one week learning vocational skills. He was attracted to working with wood and had done similar jobs during his youth in Vietnam, where one of the first places he worked was with his grandmother in the family’s malt grain business.

His most pronounced memory from those early days in this country? “You see a lot of high-rise buildings here,” he tells us. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that today, Dang plays a vital role in making those structures soar.

At 21, Dang followed his interest in carpentry into an official apprenticeship program. “My first reason was money,” the 39 year old tells us. “The next was that I really like the job.” His apprenticeship took him to various companies, and finally at Van Lom Concrete he became a journey-level Carpenter.

Six years after he started his apprenticeship, Dang arrived at Hoffman Structures. “They treat you nice here,” he says. “They provide you all the materials you want. And safety is number one for them.” In another six years he had become a foreman. “I had been there long enough,” he explains when we ask him what his company’s motivation behind promoting him was. “They thought that I knew everything I needed to know.”

Now that he’s a jobsite leader, Dang has gotten used to the duties of being a foreman. “I like being able to show people how to do things, to help.” His paycheck is now substantial enough to support his family: his wife of seven years Mong Chinh and their two sons.

The only drawback of his success may be how much time he finds himself investing on a mental level. “On a job site, you start stressing a lot. You go home to your wife and kids and it can be hard to focus on family life.”

Though he rarely works with other Vietnamese people on the job, Dang says he’s never been challenged in the workplace on the basis of ethnicity. He would, however, like to see more Vietnamese in the building trades, and ventures that there could be more resources for those who were looking at entering the industry.

“Find the trade you like and take the opportunity,” he counsels those looking for the same kind of success that he’s found in his career. The hard work is worth it. “My life would be more difficult if I wasn’t doing this. You make a better living in the trades.”

Danielle Zoller-McKenzie: Iron in the Blood

Danielle Zoller-Mckenzie, Ironworker
Danielle Zoller-McKenzie has union Ironworking in her blood — she grew up with a dad, brother, cousins and uncles in the trade. But while her family didn’t discourage her from pursuing work in their field, she wasn’t exactly encouraged to try it, either. “They thought I was going to be too small,” she says.

But a summer job as a hodcarrier – or “hoddie”, as she was dubbed by the masons she worked with convinced her she was more than up to the task. “The camaraderie is what I really liked,” she told us. “My brother worked there too. To be a woman and a hard worker is a different kind of feeling than you get than just being a ‘woman worker.’ The praise you get from working really hard, it’s just a big deal.”

After graduating high school, she worked in the shipyards, confirming her love of working in the trades. She applied to the Ironworkers apprenticeship program, and after a year of waiting – somewhat impatiently, she adds — she was in the door.

“I knew when I got into this trade that it’s a man’s world,” Zoller-McKenzie says. She was treated differently by coworkers, held to a different standard. Everyone in the program could see the double standard, but she opted to focus all the more intently on her work in the face of adversity. “It’s always paid off for me to take the high road,” she says. “Although that may not be my first instinct.”

Zoller-McKenzie started her career back in 1998 working on bridges and rebar projects. After two years, she came to Carr Construction, and has worked for the same company ever since, drawing on an enduring network of supportive co-workers rather than surfing from job to job. She says she values security over novelty: “I’d rather wait out the slow times.”

In 2000 as an apprentice, she became eligible to start work on her welding certification and passed the initial training in only three weeks. She pressed on, getting incremental raises and working hard as a “grunt,” as she puts it. She passed her journeyman’s trade certification in 2002 and has since advanced to her current role as superintendent. Through the years she took a number of OSHA classes and is now starting to teach apprenticeship training classes herself.

“I got lucky as a female,” says Zoller-McKenzie. “Because I did make friends and they took me under their wing.” (Continuing in the tradition of paying it forward, she’d like aspiring Ironworkers to know there’s now a smart phone app to aide with the math-heavy art of angle finding. Yes, it’s called Angle Finder.)

Her work has afforded Zoller-McKenzie some memorable times. She’s had a one and a half day welding assignment turn into a gig that lasted over a year, and a job in Terrebonne, Oregon for which she got to do her work 150 feet off of the ground.

The job is not without its downsides – Zoller-McKenzie says the weight of working outside in all weather conditions is getting hard to bear as her body ages. And she says she’s had to sacrifice any semblance of a “normal” family life: “The crazy schedule of this job demands pretty much 15 hours a day.”

But she likes this work. Zoller-McKenzie’s career path has taken her from journey-level worker to crew supervisor — nowadays she also performs crew foreman duties as needed, delegating tasks and being responsible for safety compliance.

She’s proud of what she does. She makes good money and, as she tells us in our interview “the kind of fun you can have on a job is unbelievable.” Looking forward, she has plans to pursue her OSHA safety supervisor certification, and would love to work as an engineer for that agency one day.

This multi-generation Ironworker’s advice to new female tradeswomen? “There’s always going to be some guy who will blow you off because they don’t believe women should be in this job. Have a thick skin. Accept what is, and find the positives.”