Roxeanne McGaston-Savage, SSH, CHST, STSC, SHRM, LEED Green Associate, Rigger One Certification, GSP

I attribute my success to stubbornness and determination. Being a single mother for much of my career, I had to provide for my children without support. Growing up in a family with a construction background inspired me and instilled a love for the industry from an early age. For me, proving that women can succeed in construction and providing for my family motivated me to push forward and continually strive for excellence.

The best career advice I ever received was from another woman in the industry who had been asked by her company to come to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and open up a new corporate office. When I handed her my resume, I had always been told you can't be a one-trick pony, you gotta wear all of these different hats to be useful and be able to get a job. When she looked at my resume, she said, you're all over the place. You've been a PE, you've been a superintendent, you've been a PM. You have all of this project management experience, but you also have all of this safety experience, and you have all of these safety credentials. What do you actually want to be? I told her I've had to do it all, I really just do whatever needs to be done, so I've got a broad range of experience, I can talk to both sides of the table. She said, Pick. I can pick up a rock and throw it and hit 20 different project managers. They are a dime a dozen. Some are good, and some are not so good, and some are just a person in a chair. But you light up when you start talking about safety. I can tell you really care. You've got all of these credentials, and it's always just kind of like this background stuff on your resume. But you need to pick which one you want to do, and that's what your resume needs to say. I can't pick up a rock and hit 10, 20 different safety professionals. Safety professionals and good safety professionals are a rare commodity. If you're looking for job security and advancement in the industry and climbing the corporate ladder, project managers are a dime a dozen, but it's not the case with safety, so I'm not telling you what to pick, but you need to pick. I promptly went home after that and updated my resume to reflect all of the safety roles and responsibilities, and I took out all of the project management role and responsibilities. Shortly thereafter, I got hired by AECOM Hunt, and was with them for almost 4 years, and I've been doing just safety ever since. I have not looked back.

The company that I am with now asked me where I want to be in 5 years, and one of the things that I put on the list aside from VP of Safety is I want to be the Chairman and founder of a community for women. I have the name picked out, Steel Toes to Stiletto Heels. I want to do an outreach in high schools, like vocational schools attached to their high schools where kids can go and start working in the trades. I visited a school in Denver where they actually had a project going on for Habitat for Humanity, where they were building mini houses for the homeless, and the kids were learning how to be an electrician, learning the basics of wiring a house, learning the basics of putting in plumbing on a house. They literally built it from the ground up, doing framing, running HVAC, putting the roof and the walls up. I'd like to get that started to where it's kind of tagged onto the STEM programs in schools and get women interested in construction and just construction in general. Get them interested in the trades and getting your education in it as early as you possibly can. Getting a job in it as early as you possibly can. Pushing the companies that you're working for to send you to the conferences, to the conventions, to the committees. Just helping them with interview coaching, salary negotiation coaching, professional certifications, helping them navigate the path to climb the ladder, because I never had any of that. Helping them break through the glass ceiling and into the C-suite of these construction companies. Put yourself out there and do it.

The opportunity is the increase in number of companies that are putting forth the effort to hire women into senior and executive leadership roles, which I have seen as a major shift over my 23 years in the industry. Some of the challenges is just the job market in general. I had worked for 18 years in the industry without being unemployed, and then I was laid off in 2022 or 2023. The difficulty of finding a job that paid close to what I had been making was not easy. I was unemployed for 7 months. The number of times I got told that I was overqualified, oh well, we can't match what your former salary was. Yeah, I'm aware. And you're really overqualified for this role that you're applying for. Yeah, I'm aware. I just need a job. I know, if it's, you need a person, I am a person. You need somebody that knows what they're doing, I know what I'm doing, I have the knowledge, I have the experience, I have the education. That's what you need, right? Yes, it is. Okay, when do I start? Yeah, we're just afraid that you're gonna leave us the minute you get a better job offer because you're so overqualified for this. Trying to convince companies that it's not necessarily about the paycheck, but the company itself. That would be what I would say is probably the greatest challenge, is finding a company that recognizes your talent and your skills and pays you what you're worth.

Do what I say, say what I do is probably at the very top of the list. I'm not going to compromise myself personally or professionally to sugarcoat for the convenience of a company. I try to be very open and free-flowing communication, not only what I'm doing and what I'm expecting, but also kind of connecting the dots within companies. Most of the companies that I have worked for are very siloed, so I'm all about breaking through those silos and working internally with different teams within a company and opening up that communication. Open communication is key. And then, of course, just making it make sense. We don't all have a college education, and even some of the ones that do have college education, I don't understand how you got that. But just helping everybody understand how to apply the rules and the regulations and making it be logical and applicable. Breaking through the rat mentality, the old dog not wanting to learn new tricks mentality. Listening to what they say and then trying to figure out a safer way to do it, and then having them commit to doing it the safer way, and then following up, or taking one of their questions and running with it and just letting them know that they are being heard.