Captains in the Community

Meet Bianca from Kapitol Group

Project Co-Ordinator for our new CHPS building

Gracie: Can you tell us a little bit about your-self?

Hi, so my name is Bianca and I’m a senior project Coordinator for Kapitol group. This is my first Passivhaus project, which is pretty exciting, and it is also my first primary school and education project which is also exciting. Something personal is I am expecting to have a baby in 3 months so that’ll be a very different experience for me.

SUSAN: Do you know what you’re having Bianca?

BIANCA: No, it’s going to be a surprise!

Lachie : Your job is being a Senior Project Coordinator with Capital Group, can you tell us what a typical day in your job might look like?

My job generally varies, so sometimes it may be full of meetings, sometimes it might be me running around the site all of the time but usually I’m the liaison between the site subcontractors, the design team and the site workers. I also make sure the subcontractors have all their required paperwork in check to be able to do the works on site, so if they need to order something, I will make sure that they order it in time, if they need to manufacture something for the job that they manufacture it in time.

I usually start work when the site opens at seven so I will generally be here at 7am.

The site workers will go home at about 3:30pm, unless they work overtime which is about 5:30pm, but we’re restricted with what the workers can do onsite due to council regulations as well, so we’re governed by their time frame on when they’re allowed to work.

Evan: How do you become a senior project coordinator and what attracted you to this job?

I never wanted to be bored. I figured I need to work for a really long time in my life when I finish school and I never wanted to do the same thing twice. Although a quarter of this job may seem like it’s the same thing over and over, every project is different and you come across all sorts of different people all the time, the different subcontractors, the different challenges, and I did have to go to University to do what I’m doing, so once I finished year 12 I went to Uni to study Construction Management and then I got a job after that and I slowly worked my way up.

Belinda: What have you enjoyed most about working on the Clifton Hill Primary School project?

That’s a difficult question because there are so many new things on this job. I enjoyed the structure portion of this job, so, you’ll see there’s a lot of concrete, but there’s also a lot of timber as well, so that’s the floor patterns and the ceiling, so the structure’s a hybrid of combined materials.

I was attracted to the industry, I was never really fazed about it being male-dominated or not. When I finished Year 12, I was eighteen at the time, and sometimes people are eighteen, nineteen, and twenty and they still don’t know what they want to be in life, it’s a very big decision to make, but I didn’t look at it as in ‘I’m the only girl’ or ‘Isn’t it just going to be a bunch of guys?. I just did it as in, ‘Okay, every day’s going to be interesting, every job’s going to be interesting and there’ll always be a light at the end of the tunnel and you always feel quite accomplished because of it as well. But, yes, there are certainly some challenges about being the only female, and that probably makes you consider your options when you select your Uni Degree or your TAFE Diploma.

There were 130 people in my diploma at RMIT and there were 3 or 4 girls that graduated, but when you go to select that course, you don’t think about that, or at least, it didn’t pop into my mind. I’m pretty fortunate because some people have had worse experiences than I have in such a male dominated industry. Since I am a keyboard woman some look at it as though they do the work.

Instead we engage subcontractors who are experts in certain fields, so you might engage an electrician, and all they might do is work on electrical stuff. When you’re working with those subcontractors, sometimes you just don’t feel like you’re taken seriously, it just feels like you’re talking to a brick wall. But, we all have challenges and it’s how we overcome them that matters.

SUSAN: Well, that’s really interesting too, isn’t it, because we’ve been interviewing a couple of different people in our community, and they’ve said the same sort of thing, that you’ve got to do something you love, because that’s where you get the enjoyment of working.

Bianca said the same sort of thing, because it doesn’t matter whether you want to be a builder or a fashion designer or whatever, gender isn't really that important, it’s about doing something that you really love, so that’s a good message that we can take away.