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Your Resume Is Underselling You, and the AI Boom Is Hiring - Oct 9, 2026

09 October 2026

Welcome to Issue 3

Happy Friday, and welcome back to Bridging the Gap.

The AI piece in the last issue got people talking, so this week I'm following it up with what's changed since. There's also the week's news, a spotlight on Garney, and something a bit more practical than usual: how to write a resume that gets you the call in heavy civil and water.


The week in brief

Mobile River Bridge is officially underway. After years of false starts, Alabama held the groundbreaking on October 2 for the $3.2B first phase of the Mobile River Bridge and Bayway. The design-build team is KMT, a JV of Kiewit , Massman Construction Co. and Traylor Bros., Inc.. Alabama Department of Transportation puts the full Phase 1 cost at more than $4.1B once right-of-way, utilities and financing are added, and the bridge should open in late 2031. My take: we featured this in Issue 1 as one to watch. Now it's real, and KMT will be staffing up along the Gulf Coast for the next five years.

SpaceX's Texas Terafab could reach $119B. Grimes County records show SpaceX 's planned chip campus near College Station could grow to about $119B over four phases running to 2036. The first phase alone is about $16.8B, with onsite power, water treatment and wastewater facilities. Tesla is building its own construction management team in the area and hiring civil PMs and site superintendents directly. My take: when the owner hires its own supers and PMs, it's competing with contractors for the same people. Central Texas firms should expect to lose some staff to it.

$426M in federal INFRA grants, with the Gulf doing well. DOT's latest round includes $85M to add lanes along about 20 miles of I-4 in Florida, $44M for the I-55/I-69 freight corridor in DeSoto County, Mississippi, and $28M for the Kaliste Saloom interchange in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Granite JV wins a $325M sewer tunnel in Cleveland. Granite Construction and Super Excavators will build the Big Creek Tunnel: more than four miles of 20-foot-diameter tunnel through rock, 50 to 100 feet down. It should keep about 550 million gallons of combined sewer overflow a year out of Lake Erie. It's the last of seven big storage tunnels in the $3B Project Clean Lake. My take: it's outside my patch, but large-diameter tunnelling crews are a national market. Expect them to get pulled in from the South.

Court halts $7.5B of border wall work in Big Bend. A federal court stay on DHS waivers has left five Big Bend border contracts in limbo, and CBP hasn't said whether work can carry on. My take: if it drags on, a lot of West Texas heavy civil capacity could be freed up quickly.


AI follow-up: what's changed since last issue

Last time I argued AI is coming for the estimate, not the estimator. A few things this week pushed that further.

The AI buildout is a construction story too

In a Construction Dive interview this week, Bain partner Peter Hanbury estimated that data center spending could total $5T to $6.5T through 2030, with AI infrastructure spending reaching about $1.5T a year by 2031. The five big hyperscalers alone could spend around $780B on capex this year. But local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth $130B in the first quarter of 2026, almost as much as in all of 2025.

His advice to contractors is to test every pipeline job on four things: is the power real, is the money real, is the community on board, and is the design stable enough to build. Electrical trades are the tightest constraint, and power is now on the critical path for everything.

Why it matters for civil and water: every one of these campuses needs roads, water, wastewater and power. SpaceX's Terafab in Texas, in the news this week, plans its own water treatment and recycling plant. The AI boom is turning into a heavy civil boom, and it's competing for the same people.

The data backs up the estimating point

Earlier this year, ServiceTitan's survey of more than 1,000 contractors found 24% already use AI for cost estimating and 22% for bid management. 38% said they're seeing measurable results, up from 17% the year before.

Dodge's AI for Contractors report found 87% of contractors expect AI to have a meaningful impact on their business, but only 26% rate their own data quality as high. 57% are worried about accuracy and 54% about security.

My take: that 26% figure is the whole story. Last issue I said clean historical data would be the real advantage, and most firms don't have it yet. The ones that sort their data out now are the ones that will get real value from these tools.


Opinion: your resume is underselling you

I read a lot of resumes, and the best people in heavy civil and water often have the weakest ones. Great supers and PMs are busy building things, not writing about them. But with so much work out there, hiring managers are looking at more resumes than ever, and the first read is often under a minute. Here's what makes the difference.

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1. Lead with your projects, not your duties. "Managed day-to-day operations" tells me nothing. For each major job, give the project name, the owner, the value, the delivery method and your role. For example: I-35 widening, TxDOT, $310M design-build, Project Manager. That one line does more work than a whole paragraph.

2. Put numbers on everything. Crew size, number of subs, budget you managed, how far ahead of schedule you finished, man-hours without a lost-time incident. Numbers are what clients remember.

3. Name the delivery method. Design-build, CMAR, progressive design-build and P3s all need different skills, and owners are asking for them more and more. If you've done them, say so clearly.

4. Show what you self-performed. In heavy civil, self-perform experience is gold. Say what your crews built directly: concrete, earthwork, pipe, structures, tunnelling.

5. List your tools and tickets. HeavyBid, HeavyJob, P6, Procore, B2W. PE, OSHA 30, DBIA, CCM. These are keywords hiring managers and screening software look for, so don't bury them.

6. Explain short stints. Project-based moves are normal in this industry, but say so. "Hired for the Port of Houston expansion, project completed" reads very differently from an unexplained one-year gap.

7. Two pages is fine. For a senior field or project leader, two pages of relevant projects beats one page of squeezed text. Just cut anything over 15 years old that doesn't add something.

8. Make sure your LinkedIn matches. Clients will look you up. If your titles and dates don't line up with your resume, it raises questions you don't want.

9. Use AI carefully. It's fine for tidying up wording, but a resume written entirely by AI reads like everyone else's. Your projects, numbers and voice are what make you stand out, so keep them.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on yours, send it over. I'm always happy to give honest feedback, whether you're looking or not.


Company spotlight: Garney

If you work in water, you know Garney. The Kansas City firm was founded by Charles Garney in 1961 as a pipeline and utility contractor, and today it's one of the biggest names in US water and wastewater. It came fourth in ENR's ranking of top GCs in water treatment and desalination, which we featured last issue.

Owned by the people who build it

Charles Garney began selling shares to employees in 1986 and had sold the rest by 1995, so Garney has been fully employee-owned for 30 years. Its people often say "every employee is an owner," and staff are told the backlog. Given what we've covered on succession in the last two issues, it's a model worth noting: ownership is spread out, so leadership is too.

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Growing on purpose

In January, Garney bought Emery Sapp & Sons, Inc., a heavy civil and underground utility contractor in Salem, Oregon, with nearly 60 years behind it. CEO David Burkhart said the deal was "about establishing lasting capability in the Pacific Northwest," adding self-performed pipeline and earthwork capacity. It's part of a push to become a full-service water provider, from the pipe in the ground to the plant.

What it means for talent: Garney self-performs a lot of its work, including complex tunnelling and large-diameter pipe, so it needs experienced field leaders more than most. With long-term offices in Nashville, Orlando, Atlanta and Fairfax, it's very active in the Southeast. Pipeline supers, CMAR project managers and plant superintendents with Garney on their resume are some of the most sought-after people in water right now.

By the numbers: CEO tenure in the ENR Top 400

This one comes from MKH Search's deep dive into the Engineering News-Record Top 400, and it shows two very different groups. A quarter of Top 400 CEOs (25.3%) have been in the top job for more than 21 years. But more than a third (35.3%) have been in it for five years or less, including 10.8% for under two.

So plenty of firms have already been through a handover recently, and plenty have one coming. Either way, the people underneath them are being watched more closely than ever. That's another reason to keep your resume up to date, even if you're happy where you are.

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Source: MKH Search analysis, ENR Top 400 firms. For the full Deep Dive, message me and I'll send it over.



That's a wrap

Thanks for reading Issue 3. If there's a company you'd like spotlighted, or a topic you want me to cover next time, let me know in the comments.

And if you'd like me to look over your resume, or just want to talk about the market, I'm always happy to chat. We also pay referral fees for good recommendations.

Have a great weekend, and see you in the next issue of Bridging the Gap.

Sophie Booker, Senior Consultant, Heavy Civil Division at MKH Search

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📩 sophie.booker@mkhsearch.com

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