Shining a spotlight on those making a difference at Wood is an important part of our inspired culture. We are all about motivating our teams to be the best they can be, recognising the expertise, capabilities, and positive energy they bring to work every single day.
For over 50 years, Wood’s Life Sciences business has delivered some of the world’s largest and most complex pharmaceutical, biotechnology and research and development facilities. Behind every single client proposal is a requirement for best-in-class estimation to allow us to compete in the market.
Jake Parrigan, based in Ohio, joined Wood in 2022 and has since become an indispensable member of the team, handling estimation for Life Sciences proposals across the globe and playing a critical role to growing this part of our business.
My construction career started early when I took on a role working as a plumbing labourer over the summers in high school. I went on to attend Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Kentucky, where I started a degree in Construction Management. While studying, I landed a job as a sheet metal labourer on a new informatics building being built on campus and attended classes at night. I continued onto an estimating/project management co-op for a process piping contractor, and this is where I realised the value that estimating brings to a project and organisation.
I’d say that my passion really started to take off after university and I spent six years working for a global engineering company. Estimating is very much like solving puzzles – taking little pieces of engineering information, knitting them together and trying to tell the story of a project through a cost lens. There’s a lot of problem solving and investigation involved and that’s what I love about this job – I think a lot of people who start on a similar career path end up in project management because it’s more popular and what more university programs are geared towards. I’m passionate about shining a light on the ‘less obvious’ career paths and the value they bring to an organisation.
That’s why I was very excited when the opportunity came up to co-chair Wood’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics) employee network for Life Sciences. As part of this role, I had the brilliant experience of talking to some elementary schoolchildren about my career as an estimator – I have to admit that it was a challenge to make estimating sound exciting to youngsters but I think it’s incredibly important for them to see the variety of careers that are out there.
As my career progresses, I’ve spent more time reflecting on the impact of the Life Sciences industry on the world. It gives me huge satisfaction to see commercials for life-changing medications which have been developed in facilities that I have worked on in the past. We really are designing the future of Life Sciences facilities that can help change people’s lives.
Outside of work, my focus is largely on my young family – my wife, three kids and three dogs. We have set ourselves the target of visiting all 50 states together by the time my oldest child is 18 – my oldest has 16 states left to hit.
