I keep hearing the same concern from people who have been in this business a long time: nobody is going to train the new estimators.

The old guys are retiring and taking forty years of judgment with them. The companies are busier than they've ever been. The person who is supposed to teach you is buried in eighteen bids due next Friday. So you get handed a plan set and a login and a desk, and you're expected to figure it out.

I know how that feels, because that was me.

When I was 19 I walked into the estimating office at my family's construction company thinking I was ready. I wasn't. My first assignment was a waterline takeoff, by hand, and I couldn't even set the scale. I didn't know what a trench was. Or appurtenances. Every takeoff I turned in came back from the chief estimator with a red pen massacre that made my pages look like they were bleeding out. The intern that sat next to me was a civil engineer on his second rotation who cranked out flawless takeoff after takeoff. It was a long summer.

I learned that to master a subject, you must work hard to learn the fundamentals. Then, you can explain seemingly complex things simply.

I was taught those fundamentals in pieces, over years, from a project manager who took me under his wing and a general superintendent with no degree and decades of command over the work. Line and grade. Stationing. Quantities. Measurement and payment.

I waited a couple of years for somebody to explain them to me.

So, I wrote them down. How public work and private work actually get bid. What to read in a bid package, and in what order. How to take a job off - all the way off. And the one that quietly costs contractors the most money: the difference between what a job costs and what you charge for it.

There's a wave of AI moving through civil preconstruction right now, and none of this gets less important because of it. The tools take the grunt work off your plate. They don't do the thinking, and they don't build the job in your head. That part is still yours. Somebody still has to learn the fundamentals.

This is my attempt to write them all down.

Pass it along to anybody who just got handed a plan set.

‍