Lauren Khamphouang

I've been working in the civil survey and engineering industries for 26 years, with a brief stint in instruction at a SACS-accredited technical community college in the technology field. I hold a Bachelor's of Science degree in industrial technology, and while I don't have an engineering license, my career path evolved beautifully through the Department of Transportation where I worked in roadway design as a technician for many years. I was promoted through different positions which ultimately led me to utility coordination, and what's beautiful about this field for me specifically is that it doesn't require a professional engineering license and there's no national certification process or formal school for it. My roadway design background gives me the technical understanding of what can happen in designs that would affect utilities, and I have very good people skills which allow me to speak effectively with utilities and handle the conflicts that are part of my daily work. I facilitate and mitigate conflicts in large highway projects prior to construction, working closely with design engineers and utility engineers to design around problems rather than moving actual utilities during construction, because that's very expensive and time-consuming. My day-to-day is very similar to project management - I make sure everybody's on schedule, submits their reviews and paperwork on time to get all agreements and permits in place, handle conflict resolutions, and communicate with everyone to make sure we understand where everyone's going to go in the project before it's constructed. It's like choreographing a little dance to make sure no one is on top of each other, whether that's utility workers, utility facilities, roadway contractors, their staging, or their machines. The challenging part is that a very large portion of utility coordination is underground, so I rely heavily on subsurface utility engineering (SUE) and contractors to help find things underground and then figure out where it needs to go. I recently achieved a major career goal by becoming an associate (partner) with my company, and I also won the Northeast Florida Engineers Week Award for Engineering Associate or Engineering Tech of the Year - both of these accomplishments happened this year. Beyond my professional work, I'm very goal-oriented and believe that institutional knowledge does not mean job security, so the more I learn and share, the bigger and better team we can build.