Her Story
About Tamae
I've been in civil engineering for a little over 30 years, and my career has been quite a journey. I started off in civil engineering, and most of my career has been in program and construction management, which then morphed into strategy, business, technical advisory, transformational change, and operational improvements. Generally, most of my work has been infrastructure-related, particularly on the transportation side of civil engineering, although I've done everything from water treatment plants to dams to reservoirs, to railroads, landfills, parks, and buildings. I take projects from an idea to a real thing - I make Pinocchio a real boy. Clients come to me and say they want to do something, and I figure out how to get it done. I figure out how to plan it, finance it, find funding whether it's tax dollars for public clients or helping businesses grow and scale across multiple operations. I look at everything from planning to design, environmental situations, land acquisition, utility coordination, funding, finances, permitting, stakeholder engagement, public relations, government and policy, contract administration, procurement, bidding, schedules, and estimating. I've also had my hands in the field, down and dirty, literally in the dirt and in the asphalt, building things. The projects I've built are in the trillions now, over 30 years. My last major project was a technical advisory role where we took about $5 million and grew it to almost $200 million through the USDOT Thriving Communities program. They gave us $5 million to spread across 15 disadvantaged communities across the nation, and we helped grow them through technical advisory and capacity building services. We either found them grants or loans and helped them better their communities, then figured out how to do that on their own after that - teach you how to fish instead of fish for you. That's the kind of thing I do - I look for ways to make things more efficient and more effective. I joke around and say I was Doge before Doge was cool, except it's not necessarily about cutting things. Sometimes it's restructuring or organizing things so you can move things faster, more productively, or make people more productive, because you want to make people the best versions of themselves so they produce the most. Right now, I'm in an internal-facing role as the Global Growth Knowledge Lead, handling Proposal AI and project reference finder within the company. It has to do with transformational change, working AI into the business, trying to incorporate strategic growth within the company and tying all of that together.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Tamae
01What do you attribute your success to?
It's not just one specific thing. What I would say in general is that I get to get up every day and I get to make people's lives better. Every day that I get up, and every day that I do my job, I make the world better for somebody, somewhere. If I had to choose one specific achievement, I guess I could point to that most recent project where I grew $5 million to $200 million and got to help 15 disadvantaged communities across the United States. Some were in really challenging situations, like an island in St. Paul, Alaska, that literally has only 400 people who were getting stranded on their island for two to three weeks at a time. We had to coordinate with the FAA because their communications kept going down, and you're talking about people that were literally starving to death with no access to medevac or anything. We got them the second Starlink system that was ever put out through the USDOT and the FAA. Just helping those 15 communities was really impactful because you're taking these smaller communities and not only making it better for them right now, but showing them how to do it after we were gone. The contract was only for 2 years because DOT would only fund it for 2 years, but after the fact, I can say, now you have all these tools in your toolbox, all these tricks of how to handle things and make things happen, and knowing who to talk to and when to talk to them. Just knowing that you made those people's lives better and taught them how to continue doing it themselves, that feels really good.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice came from my first boss, George Bird. When I first started working, every time I did something, I would give it to him to check, asking if it was okay. Or somebody would ask a question and I'd go ask him what I should say. He'd ask me what I thought, and I'd tell him, and he'd just say, okay, well then go say that. After a couple months of this, he finally asked me, how many times have you walked in my office and said you don't know what to do or what's the answer to this, and then I just turned around and asked you what the answer was, and then just told you to go do whatever you thought? I realized it was pretty much every single time. He told me, go do what you're supposed to do. He said, if it's something big, obviously it's a big deal, but you don't need to worry about bringing every little thing to me. He said, you're in this position because we trust you, and because we have faith in your abilities. I was new, just out of school, hadn't been doing this very long, and I was in this position on a $65 million project with a dam and a reservoir and treatment plant. I was way in over my head, didn't have any idea how to do any of it. But you just kind of figure it out, and sometimes that's the best way to learn. He gave me the confidence to do that, to trust myself and just make decisions. I would definitely say that he was probably one of the best influences that I ever had.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Especially in the world, in the AI that we're living in, the world that we are going to be in 2 or 3 years from now is going to be completely different. I'm already forecasting and foresee that the way of us doing business is going to have to change. You're going to have to learn to be agile and to change. The way of the world that we used to always live in - you go to school, you get a degree doing the thing, you graduate doing the thing, you get a job doing the thing, you do the thing for a while, you work up the corporate ladder doing things, and then you finally retire - nope, not gonna happen anymore. That world is gone. AI is going to completely turn that upside down on its head, and if you're not prepared for that change, then you better start and figure it out, especially if you're young. I have a daughter right now, and I keep trying to explain these things to her, and it's kind of hard, because at that age, a lot of times, you don't even really know what you want to do. The biggest thing that you can do that I would tell a young person is that you need to be agile. You need to be able to be flexible. You need to be able to solve problems. Do not get stuck just trying to do one thing.
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