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With a title like team lead, technology architecture, you might expect to find PCL Construction employee Terence Yung at a Silicon Valley conglomerate. Instead, he’s spent the last 10 years in Alberta helping his industry evolve.
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“The construction business has typically been viewed as an older industry where we’re just building buildings and not as an advanced industry that leverages technologies,” says Yung.
But advanced is exactly what PCL is, it points out — a construction industry giant supported by a burgeoning business technology workforce. Yung and his team are based in Edmonton, North American headquarters for the 116-year-old company since 1932, and home to most of its technology, accounting, human resources, marketing and other teams.
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“I lead a combined team of technology analysts and solution architects who are responsible for overseeing the back-end IT infrastructure services, and for designing new technology solutions,” he says.
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In the past decade, he notes, PCL has migrated 95 percent of its formerly on-premise IT infrastructure into the cloud as part of a bold decision to stand out as a construction company with a high-tech edge. “The migration allowed us to align our IT directions with tech giants like Microsoft, and build scalable solutions for our business,” Yung says.
Those solutions include software that collects data through sensors around job sites. They bridge the gap between technology and construction, and they give employees on site and in offices the information needed to work more efficiently and deliver results to clients.
“Now we know in real time what is happening on site, which frees people to do more meaningful work than just collecting information,” says Yung.
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The construction company’s pioneering embrace of cloud technologies has created a host of tech career opportunities at PCL, says Harmony Carter, vice president of people and culture. “It’s the buildings that bring us attention,” Carter says, “which is understandable since we’ve built many of the arenas and stadiums in this country, several large-scale civil infrastructure and industrial projects and the tallest high-rise in Western Canada in Edmonton. What people don’t realize is that we are actually one of the biggest IT employers you’ll find in Alberta.”
This means PCL is in a position to shape the future direction of large-scale construction, according to Carter. “We have the ideas and the problems to solve, so we’ve taken an innovative and forward-thinking approach, where we don’t have to find someone in the market to provide solutions.”
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It means that new tech graduates looking for work should look at PCL, which is only going to expand further in that direction, says Carter. “Everyone thinks of PCL and construction together, but they’re not thinking of us as tech right away. We want to change that — we’re both.”
Innovative thinking is just one way PCL is attracting top talent across the company. Entirely employee-owned for almost half a century, PCL invests deeply in its employee-owners, with a strong mobility program through which employees can relocate to one of the locations across North America or Australia. They can take advantage of opportunities to develop their careers quickly, and numerous open-to-all leadership courses.
The community-minded ethos extends even to its tech investment. “We think we can enhance our entire industry by choosing to build technology with the idea that we can pass it on to other construction companies, so that they can also improve how construction is built in this country,” says Carter.
This story was produced by Mediacorp in partnership with Postmedia, on behalf of PCL Construction.