Philadelphia-area construction firms build up for busier days

They are miles apart on the career spectrum, the 23-year-old recent graduate from Philadelphia University and the 59-year-old executive.

But Jennifer Pilgrim and David Strange share top billing in the get-ready-to-rumble story of a national construction company with ambitions of being a dominant player here once building regains its nerve.

Pilgrim and Strange are recent hires at Skanska USA Building Inc., of Blue Bell, where the payroll has grown an industry-rare 10 percent (12 people) since January, despite a punishingly long construction drought.

Sound like a company with a serious reality disconnect? Hardly. Construction firms around the Philadelphia region say they are rebuilding, regrouping, and retraining now for busier days in the future.

Skanska, for example, insists the currently miserable construction stew of stalled projects, sidelined backhoe loaders, and laid-off engineers, estimators, and project supervisors, offers opportunity.

The company, which entered the Philadelphia market via the 2000 acquisition of Barclay White Inc., also opened a satellite office in Wilmington last month, staffed with a single employee.

"It's a good market to get good people now," said Ed Szwarc, Skanska's Philadelphia-area general manager and executive vice president.

Vouching for that is Daniel J. Keating III, president and chief executive officer of Keating Building Corp. A year ago, Keating hired John K. Ball away from the company Ball's maternal grandfather, Ray Shoemaker, established 66 years ago: Shoemaker Construction Co. in West Conshohocken.

Ball had been president of Shoemaker. He is now senior vice president of operations at Keating.

"I felt he would be able to lead us in areas we haven't pursued, or haven't pursued very well," Keating said last week of the hiring decision, made during a period when his company shed a half-dozen employees and was acquired by Perini Corp., of Framingham, Mass.

Hiring requires money, something construction companies are not exactly flush with these days. Layoffs have been more the norm.

There have been 15 at Shoemaker in the last two years. (Ball was not a layoff; his departure, made "on the very best of terms," was his decision, his brother said.)

Shoemaker is using this retrenchment period to further train its remaining workforce of 35, said Roger Ball, who succeeded John Ball as president.

"In lieu of capturing new talents from others that may be in layoff mode, we're kind of focused on retraining our core talent," he said.