[00:00:00] David Tibbetts: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Beyond Prequalification. I'm David Tibbetts. I'm the Chief Safety Officer at Highwire.

Uh, we are certainly going beyond prequalification today, on a little bit of a tangent, but an important one, and one that I'm excited to talk about today. Higher education, if you will, educating the next generation of safety professionals. And I have two guests joining me today. Brady Keene from Keene State University, and I have Corey Silverman from Highwire.

Uh, Brady, talk to us about how you got into safety. What led you to Keene State?

[00:00:35] Brady Keene: I got into safety by chance. I'll be honest. Uh, I kind of rewind a little bit, uh, into my high school days.

I was a pretty good baseball player. I was getting scouted by a couple D one colleges and, you know, I had verbal commitments from a couple of them, and I thought I was good to go. I was gonna go to college and play ball and then, uh, I got hurt my sophomore, sophomore and junior year.

Ended up having to have a couple of shoulder surgeries, and you know, with that, you lose scholarships. Right. And my girlfriend at the time said to me, Well, what are you gonna do now? You know, where are you gonna go to college? And I was like, well, where are you going to college? I'm just gonna apply everywhere you go.

Being the lover, boy, that I am, right. So I applied to all the colleges she did, and uh, we ended up getting to a lot of the same colleges. And I was like, so where are you going? And she's like, Keene State. And I was like, I guess I'm going to Keene State too. I had no idea what I wanted to do in college. My focus had always been on baseball.

But you know, on my way to orientation at Keene State, I kind of had, had to make up my mind on what I wanted to do with my life. And on that car ride up there, I said, I'm gonna be a high school history teacher and I went into that orientation group and started in an education 101 class, and I hated it.

It was just awful. But at the same time, I was taking a safety 101 class, and just really liked it. I had a really good professor. As an LSU PhD, a chemistry professor turned safety professor, and he was just stellar. And, uh, I kind of fell in love with safety from that point on.

And, um, yeah, I stuck with it. I wanted to be a teacher. I'm a teacher, just at a much higher level now at Keene State. Right. So that's, that's how I got into safety, kind of a roundabout way.

[00:02:17] David Tibbetts: There you go. Pretty, a pretty unique story in the safety profession, wouldn't you say?

Not so much. Right. A lot of us, uh, kind of find our way there. But you followed your girlfriend to college, but the good news is that was a good decision, right?

[00:02:30] Brady Keene: That's right. She's my wife now, and we do have a 1-year-old, Mr. Bennett. So, uh, I'd say it worked out all the way around. Right?

[00:02:36] David Tibbetts: Yeah, absolutely. So Corey, uh, Keene State graduate as well. Talk about your path. Not all that different, right?

[00:02:44] Corey Silverman: Yep. I also ended up in safety by chance. Um, I went into Keene State intending to be a history major. I always enjoyed learning about history. It was my favorite subject in high school. So it just felt logical to major in college. But after, uh, my freshman year, I didn't really see a career path with it. I enjoyed learning about it, but I didn't really want to be a teacher. I didn't really wanna go to law school. I didn't wanna work in the museum, not too much else to do with a history degree. And I wanted a major that I felt like would lead me to a real career path, something that would get me a job right outta college.

And everyone's telling me, check out the safety major. And my first reaction was, What does that even mean? Safety is not a school subject. How do you major in safety? But I heard so many good things about it. I decided to check it out, and like Brady said, seven years later, here I am.

[00:03:29] David Tibbetts: That's really cool.

And, uh, you guys met during both of your time at Keene State, right? How did, how did that play out?

[00:03:35] Corey Silverman: Yeah, so I was working an internship with a manufacturing company in New Hampshire, and we brought Brady and his team from Workwise New Hampshire out to do an audit of our site. And so Brady and I met then, stayed in contact.

He ended up becoming a professor, yeah.

[00:03:49] David Tibbetts: Yeah. That's great. And, uh, we'll talk quite a bit about the sort of network that is kind of Keene state, and it's just cool to see you guys maintaining that connection over the years. You know I've, I'm really lucky to have Corey here working with me at Highwire.

And so Keene State and the other places that Corey worked, you all did a great job of preparing him for his career and safety, and so we'll talk a little bit more about that as well. But, you know, Keene State, to some degree, it is unique, right? Keene State has a dedicated, I should say, even more than one dedicated safety degree program.

Let's talk about, at a high level, the programs that Keene State has, and what makes Keene State unique in the Northeast. And then we'll kind of take it from there. But I think it'd be really interesting for the audience to understand Keene State's programs and how they've evolved, specifically as it relates to not just safety, but also construction management.

[00:04:43] Brady Keene: I'll give you a little bit of a timeline. Believe it or not, the safety program started because of a driver safety program that Keene State had in the late eighties. The program then took a couple of leaps. We had a few really key members of faculty, David Buck and Larry McDonald's in the nineties that, uh, decided to shift that towards occupational safety and health. And with those two, they really started to grow and grow the program. You know, a lot of the people that, um, you know, are Highwire clients and a lot of the people that are in the field were a part of those original classes in the early nineties.

Fast forward to today, our three programs Safety or Safety and Occupational Health Applied Sciences, Construction Safety, and Construction Management. Between the three programs, we're sitting at around 380 to 400 students.

I must say our construction safety program is fairly new in, in, you know, comparison to our regular safety program, which, as I said, has been around since really the nineties.

Um, the construction safety program is maybe about six, seven years old now, and that was started, uh, with support from the AGC nationally, as well as a number of different, large general contractors who said, We're not gonna have enough construction safety professionals in 10 years. We need to get out in front of this.

With the help of Larry McDonald, who is still here, Wayne Harts, and a number of other people at Keene State, just built it. And we had a goal of getting, you know, 25 students in that program. And that was by 2024, and now we're at about 70 students in that program.

The demand has never been higher. And then our construction management program, you know, that's only, this is gonna be its fourth year, and we went from three students in our first year to well over a hundred students now. It's, it's been an incredible ride with a lot of learning along the way, but generally those are our programs where we stand now, and a little bit of the background behind it.

[00:06:39] David Tibbetts: It's really cool to see those programs evolving and cool to see that there's a specific focus on construction safety as well. Because, as you know, industry to industry, there's, uh, there are some significant differences, so certainly worthwhile to have that focus. Corey, talk a little bit about your time at Keene State, the path that you followed, your specific degree, and what your experience was.

[00:07:00] Corey Silverman: So, I took a few different classes in safety, and what I really liked about the safety field was how you can apply it to so many different industries. I found that construction was where my interest was. And so after a few internships, my first role after college ended up not being in construction, but after that, I decided I wanted to go back to the construction industry.

And that's really where I've been most of the last few years. I worked for a large GC for a number of years, and now with Highwire, obviously, most of our market is in the construction industry. So, to me, that's one of the coolest things about the safety major. The way that there are so many different industries it can be applied to, and you can find the one that's most interesting to you, and there's probably a need for safety in it.

[00:07:40] David Tibbetts: So Corey, what was it about construction that specifically drew you to that industry?

[00:07:45] Corey Silverman: The whole process of seeing a pile of dirt turn into a large building or a large piece of infrastructure, compared to some other environments where it's more of the same old stuff every day. Construction is just so dynamic.

There's so many interesting people you meet from the trades all the way up to the executive level. It's always different every day, and there's always a new scope of work going on, a new trade being brought on-site to do a new scope of work. You just learn so much every single day, and it's just such a fun environment to be a part of.

[00:08:13] David Tibbetts: Yeah, for sure. I mean, from the first shovel in the ground to that end product is like, it's an incredible journey, right?

Brady, you mentioned construction management as a relatively new program, construction safety. Uh, one of the things that we talked about, you know, leading up to today, was how in the construction safety degree program, those students are taking a couple of courses from the construction management track and vice versa.

Why does the university think that's so important? Why do you think that's so important that those two sort of degree tracks get some exposure to the other?

[00:08:44] Brady Keene: A part of our programs is that we take the input from industry and apply it to our curriculum. This AGC Construction Safety Board that we have, uh, we have about 36 individual members with over 20 different companies. You think about the Big 10 in construction, a lot of those guys are a part of our group.

We have insurance carriers, and we have independents as well that provide support, right? And a couple of years ago, I went to them saying, you know, what are we giving our safety students, on the operations side? Like, what are they learning so that they can integrate better into ops, just like we want ops to integrate better into safety?

Right? And the conversation was great, and we landed on having them take either three or four courses in the construction management realm, commercial construction, construction methods, construction management one, and then some students take construction management two as well. And then on the construction management side, you know.

The safety professional's dream is to have ops integrated into safety and vice versa. So we said, well, can we give them the safety experience? Can we give them the introduction to safety, the standard compliance realm of safety, at the very least? And what we're finding is that when these students graduate and get out into the field, they can jump between ops and safety now. Yes, there's a learning curve that, you know, goes on, but a lot of our students are getting to pick where they want to go. I know, like I work with a midsize construction firm outta Rhode Island that doesn't really care what your degree is in as long as you can do the job according to, you know, their safe practices and what operations are looking to achieve.

Right? So, uh, a lot of curricular input comes from our board. We, as a faculty and you know, as a department, make that decision to stop siloing different programs and start working more together, just like we want industry to do. Right? So that's where a lot of that stems from.

[00:10:41] David Tibbetts: I mean, I think it's incredibly important.

I just think back to myself in the earliest days of my career after college, and now being actually out in the field, and one of the things that I really wish I had a better understanding of was the different roles that people play. From an operations perspective, whether that's the project manager, the superintendent, a field engineer, I really wish that I had learned a little bit earlier on exactly kinda what makes them tick, what's important to them, what their primary responsibilities are, uh, because I think it could have helped me do my job a bit better.

It's really hard to do if you don't have at least some baseline level of understanding of who they are, what they do, and what's important to them. And then on the flip side, you need to understand how they can influence safety in their roles, but also for them, like to your point of the, the folks in the construction management degree program, safety is not their primary responsibility, regardless of little catchphrases that you might hear right out there.

Um, they have other things that are the primary function of their role. But they need to understand in their position, in their position of leadership, how can they influence safety. So I think it's really important. I love that you've come to that conclusion through your relationships with your partners, whether it's in insurance, the AGC, or some of the companies that you work with.

The fact that you've come to that conclusion, I think it's great. I think it's really important.

[00:12:07] Brady Keene: It has been really great. And I, I also wanna say, like our construction safety program, it was the first of its kind in the country. We're still one of the few in the country that offer the in-person four-year construction-specific degree.

We focus on construction. We have construction-specific classes. Yes, we do pull from our safety curriculum, but a lot of it is standalone. Uh, so we've really said, you know, to the industry and to ourselves, construction is a priority, because we don't have enough people to fill those role gaps. And we will continue to have that problem in the future.

[00:12:42] David Tibbetts: So we heard how you two found the safety degree program at Keene State. I'm curious, Brady, at this point, are there more students who are coming to Keene State already knowing that safety is a thing, it's a degree program or is there still, do you feel like a large percentage of 'em who are, for lack of a better term, stumble, stumbling across it or, or finding it along the way?

[00:13:06] Brady Keene: You know, when I was in school, about 95% of our majors came as found majors. So they were undeclared, or they came in as a different major, and then they said, Oh, I'm gonna take a safe 101 class, like an introductory easy class. And then they found out they liked it.

Things have shifted a little bit since I was in school. I would say that we bring in maybe 25 to 30 students that are actively declared in our majors. And then for construction management, like they're blowing us out of the water.

We're talking like 50 students that are actively declared into that major. What I'm seeing, though, is that a lot of those students come to our open houses and they come to our admitted students days thinking they want to do construction management, not knowing that construction safety exists. And after I talk with the parents and the students, they end up coming to safety. So I think that a lot of the construction management folks are thinking they wanna do construction management are shifting towards safety, which, you know, I'm biased, I'm a safety nerd, right? You know, I would generally say maybe 25 to 30% of our population comes from people who are coming here for safety and health.

Then the remainder are still found. It still goes on. We still offer, I think, four or five sections of our IS Safe 101 class, which is a general elective course at Keene State. So we get anyone from theater to music, to safety, to construction, you name it. Every type of major is in our program. Some way, shape, or form.

Which is pretty cool.

[00:14:39] Corey Silverman: The curriculum at Keene State's obviously evolved quite a bit in the last few years. When I was there, we only had the SOHAS major.

There was no construction safety specific. There was no construction management. I was curious if you see any other potential innovations coming to the education curriculum in the next five, 10 years. Any other changes like that, whether it's based on industry demand or what the students wanna see, or just anything else that might be coming down the pipeline?

[00:15:03] Brady Keene: I think the further integration with Safety and Ops will continue.

I strongly believe that safety will have a lot more impact the more that they know about operations. Even from like simple things and estimating to field engineer-type duties, all the way up to PX-type duties. Right. At least understanding that work and understanding the pressure that comes with it in the operation side is critical to, you know, making safety important on day-to-day work or in day-to-day work, right?

We have to understand one another on a project. We can't operate in silos, and that further integration is gonna really help us do that. I also see in construction management, maybe a pullback on safety, just because of the number of things that they are being asked to do now. I mean, it seems like every day they have to have a new task, a new skill, or something that they're learning.

They're dealing with a lot of different things on a human level as well, between mental health and the operational challenges of trades in the trades craft, right? There's a lot of things that they have to take care of on the ops side, and I actually really appreciate that. Right. So curricularly, a retraction on safety or maybe a consolidation is a better word, so that we can get them from three classes to two classes and get them the information that actually matters instead of blanket-type information.

I think that's what's coming. Now I'll move into AI here. There are two boats when it comes to higher ed in AI. There is a boat of faculty that are like We're gonna go all in on it. That's this guy, right? Like I, you gotta use AI. But then there's the other boat that has a full prohibition on AI.

I don't agree with the prohibition statement because it's not fair to expect that these kids aren't gonna be using AI when they graduate.

They are a hundred percent, 110% going to be using AI models as soon as they're out in the field. It’s the expectation that they will be right? Uh, I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of large executive companies, big executives within those companies as of late, maybe about a dozen in the last three or four months or so, and every single one of them is saying, What are you teaching your students about AI?

Because I'm gonna need them to use it as soon as they're with us. And for me, that's, it's destroyed my class curriculum. Because I have to take a step back and say, all right, these students still need to do this work. They're still gonna need access to the information, but what tool am I providing to them that's AI-based to help them do that work better than anyone else's right now?

So I have completely torn apart my class. I force AI use in the classroom whether they want to or not. They are using it. They have to use different tools and explore different tools. We did a project a couple of weeks ago where I said, All right, each individual group, and there are nine groups in my class, has to find an AI tool that can be used on a construction project day to day, and you need to tell me about what it does and how to use it.

Next thing you know, I've got all these different groups using all these different tools because other people told them about them. Right? So that's the kind of fast-paced environment we've really had to put into our classroom really quickly, just so students have a taste, right?

The other thing that I think is going to become critically important is preparing the student not only for the technical part of their job, but the soft part of their job. And that's what we do good at Keene State.

Like we're a liberal arts institution that provides a full realm of opportunity and learning for student, and provides them the technical information they need to do their job. So I think there's gonna be a continuation of that soft skill focus. You know, how do you handle conflict in the age of AI?

Because you can't sit there and talk to an LLM about a guy that's screaming in your face, right? You've gotta know how to work with that. How are you dealing with the high workloads, right? You know, students coming out of the, this is the COVID era of student, right? Middle school and high school. They were asynchronous for a number of years, right?

And their workloads were pretty, you know, they were much less in comparison to what they could have been if COVID didn't happen, and they expect a lot of structured-type assignments. Well, when you get into the construction industry, I don't think anything is structured right? Like, day to day, everything's constantly shifting.

So for me, in my classroom and for a number of our professors, we actually, you know, we force them into high workloads. They have to go and work with different people in their groups. They have to be able to present in a classroom in front of everyone without reading off slides, without looking at note cards, without doing all the stuff that you see students do during presentations in college.

Right? Extremely stressful. You know that preparation isn't to instill fear in them, but to just tell them, like, this is a small percentage of the stress that you're probably going to experience as soon as you graduate. And at the same time, I have to, and we have to, as a, as a department instill a, a, a sense of psychological safety because yeah, we're gonna push these students, we're gonna give them high workloads, put them into high stress environments, but at the same time, we need to be able to support them.

They're going to come across mental health challenges. How do we support them during those times? Right? How do we support the anxiety that comes with presenting in front of a class or getting four projects done at once? Right? These are things that students, one, are going to have to learn when they get in into industry because they're gonna experience those, those pressures, right?

And two, to show them that people actually care. And I think, you know, as a construction industry, you know, I'm an academic. I don't work in industry every single day, but if I were to ask industry to do one thing, it's, you know, don't just focus on your trades and your trades craft and their mental health, but think about these students that are coming into your organizations and how are you supporting their mental health?

Because they're COVID students. They're coming from a world that we have never experienced before in our lives. Right? They're coming through a process in, you know, an institutional process that was unlike anything we've seen in history. So, how are you taking those students in? Are you providing an area of psychological safety for them, an opportunity for them to understand that this is a learning environment?

Not just a high-stress, high, you know, fast-paced environment. You know, AI, it's not coming. It's already here. They've gotta know how to use it. The continuation shift towards AI use is there, soft skills are gonna continue to be a huge thing.

We're extremely focused here at Keene State on that. And then generally providing psychological safety as an industry to those students and communicating to our industrial partners that you need to understand the type of student that's coming into your business is, is gonna be critically important to us.

[00:22:20] David Tibbetts: Yeah. So many key points there. I think there have been a ton of strides made in construction about just caring for workers, right? Mental health, wellbeing, total worker care. You know, and to your point, that should extend and not that it's only focused on the craft and the frontline workers, but we've gotta be mindful of everyone.

'cause it is a high-stress, high-pressure environment for everyone. I love how you talked about bridging the gap between the stuff that you have to learn. Obviously, part of the curriculum is, hey, listen, you need to understand what you need to do to be baseline compliant, right?

You need to understand what the standards are and how they apply to the industry that you end up in, right? That is baseline. Everybody needs to have that understanding, but. What are the best practices? What are the soft skills? How do we influence leadership? What are the management systems and best practices that actually deliver performance and drive continuous improvement?

So I love that you are, you're talking about those things. Corey, you, you know, you and I talked last week about that fact, and obviously, you know, Keene State is focused on that, trying to bridge that gap between compliance and the real world. But you know, as we talked, there's only so much you can do because it is, there is a transition period there, right? Regardless of how much your education and your university tries to prepare you for.

Like, look, this is a classroom, these are some of the things that you're gonna experience when you get out there. Here's some best practices. It's still, there's still a learning curve there, and I think employers need to understand that. So Corey, you have a little perspective to share there?

[00:23:55] Corey Silverman: Yeah, absolutely.

It's like you said. There's no way in a classroom to properly prepare someone to step out on a construction site for the first time and be able to communicate with people who have been in the trades for 20 plus years. You know, I think that was an issue I struggled with at first. You know, when I was brand new to construction and I'm expected to influence and help manage these trade people who have been in the industry for 20 plus years. You know, what do I know that I can give them when they've been here their whole lives longer than I've been alive? So ultimately, I think that Keene State does what they can. Um, I think that using internships to get that real-world experience is really important because, as a new grad, of course, there's gonna be some time to let you ramp up and kind of get your feet wet, but ultimately you're gonna be expected to be making a difference and making impact on the site very quickly. And if you're doing that after your only experience being in the classroom, it's gonna be a transition period, and there's gonna be some rough times.

[00:24:48] David Tibbetts: I think it is a great point, and I want to transition to talking about some of the partnerships, Brady, that you guys have established, not just with the AGC and insurers, but also with, you know, companies like Turner and PCL and Shamut. But it is a great point. You know, when you are an intern, you have a summer internship, and Brady, I know you guys are doing a great job of placing students with some of the best leading companies, leading builders in this region, for internships. When you have an internship, you know, there's sort of a different, there's a different expectation, right? They understand that, you know, you're young, you're a student, this is an internship. They are gonna make sure that they are sort of treating it as a learning experience.

They're gonna sort of control what the expectations are for you, and that is absolutely appropriate, right? Based on kinda where you are in your career. But to your point, Corey, when you get your first full-time job that you, you know, you might have a, a little bit of a, Hey, this is a grace period, you know, a few months, let's, let's, let's get 'em into the culture, let's, you know, talk about how we do things here.

But at a certain point, it's like, all right, it's time to kind of make an impact. So, I think that's really relevant. One thing before we transition totally away from AI, Corey, how much would you say we talk about AI in our day-to-day?

[00:26:00] Corey Silverman: Probably upwards of five, six times a day.

Everyone's asking about it. Clients wanna know what we're doing with it, what we're gonna do next. So it's everywhere.

[00:26:08] David Tibbetts: Yeah. And if you saw the announcement last week from Turner. Right. Turner entered into an agreement with OpenAI to put ChatGPT in the hands of every one of their 15,000 employees. Right. So Brady's giving people some experience, you're giving your students experience with it, you are encouraging them, almost forcing them to use it.

Right. And, if you weren't, if you took that other approach and you were like, Nope, no AI, how would that impact whether or not they were attractive to a company like Turner, right? Like, Turner has fully embraced it and just like many companies are, but that was just something that struck me, that announcement, kind of up against the conversation that you just had about getting, getting it in the hands of your students, getting them experience with it, getting them to think critically.

I think in construction, maybe more so than any other industry, it's gonna be a long time before AI replaces humans, right? There is human interaction that has to happen. That's incredibly important to the success of a construction project and construction companies, right? Building relationships, influencing behaviors, learning from each other, craft workers, learning from, you know, ops and leadership, leadership and safety professionals. Learning from the craft like that is not going away, but AI can help us be more effective in the work that we do. So, it is something that certainly should be embraced.

Let's transition a little bit as we kind of get towards closing this out. We've touched on the relationships that you have with DAGC, Brady. Relationships with some of the leading builders and organizations in the New England region. How is that helping to influence your students' experience?

We've touched on internships, and that might be one way, but talk about how important it is to have those relationships to help your students get some exposure to companies like those, and also to get them some experience during the course of their time at Keene State.

[00:28:03] Brady Keene: These partnerships have been incredible.

They've changed the way that we think about, you know, day-to-day safety and how we implement that into our curriculum. Right? Not only that, but these guys are providing those internship opportunities that Corey was just telling us about, right? Uh, we actually require about 400 hours of internship credits within our construction safety major.

Uh, so that's usually eight credits worth of internship or two summers. They can pack it into one if they want, but they're, they're out in the field, and they actually have to do the job. And, you know, we were just talking about AI a little bit, and one of the things that came of these internships this past summer.

You know, usually students come back to m,e and they're like, oh, I got paid so much. Oh, I got to live here, blah, blah, blah. Right? This year it was, I got to do this with this tool. I got to play around with our software. I got to do this with whatever it is, right?

The students were excited about the tools that they were using. Any company that wants to stay relevant, any company that wants to continue to be able to hire safety professionals in the future, need to make the jump technologically. Our students, you know, yeah, they want to travel the world, great, but they're gonna, a lot of companies are offering that now.

If you wanna set yourself apart from everyone else, offer them the opportunity to play with the latest and the greatest tools that are out there. Just getting back to the AGC partnership and our partners, these guys, you know, they financially have supported us in the curricular development.

They give our students scholarships, they help support our research. We're pushing, you know, boundaries that before, no one wanted to get close to because of this support that they've been able to offer. They have their own AR VR lab in our building now, where we can simulate a lot of work. We can integrate with construction management and architecture professionals now and get safety in other areas of operations working together.

Right. These are some of the just basic examples of how they've been able to help. But I'll tell you, we couldn't have done it without this group. There's a couple of guys, especially Jim Goss and Carl Heinlein, as well as the former executive team at Turner, Bob Koons from Dimeo.

You know, all these guys have been incredibly instrumental into getting us where we're at. And they're seeing the impact in the field now. Our students are going to work for 'em, and they're doing the best job out of anyone. You know, you can hire anyone from any other institution in the Northeast, but they still choose Keene State.

Right. And what does that mean? Means we're doing a good job, hopefully.

[00:30:42] David Tibbetts: I think you are too. We got Corey, who works here at Highwire. Mara Craig is another employee at Highwire. She's a Keene State graduate, and you really can't go anywhere in New England, whether it's in construction or any other industry, and not run into graduates of Keene State

who are serving in high-level leadership roles at some of the biggest companies around, right? Shaun Carvalho is the Chief Safety Officer at Shamut, right? C-level executive. Right? Bryan Kingsbury is the Corporate Safety Director at Consigli. Aaron Calkins is the Safety Director at WT Rich.

Right? All of those are some general contractors in and around New England, and even national general contractors, construction managers. Then you've got Tim Hunt, who's the director of EHS at WL French. Darren DeSena, Safety Director at TG Gallagher, Robert Fuller, Director of EHS at Cannistraro. You know, I only sort of mention those names just to, again, hopefully continue to generate some excitement around this profession.

These are folks who graduated from Keene State, who made their way up through the ranks, and now are serving in leadership roles at some of the biggest and best general contractors and construction managers, or some of the largest specialty trade contractors who are delivering exceptional work. And so, you know, you mentioned as well, the number of students that are there.

But just to continue to kind of generate that excitement, uh, in advance of our. Podcast recording here today, we talked about the graduates who are coming out of Keene State and the opportunities that are out there for them, and also, let's just pump it up, right? The average salary of someone coming outta Keene State working in the safety profession.

Can you share some of that, Brady? Because it is a great profession and there's a wonderful career path here, and so let's, let's continue to generate some excitement.

[00:32:30] Brady Keene: If there's anyone out there that's thinking about, where is their kid gonna go to college? What profession should they get into?

Safety might be that area. At Keene State, with our safety students, we collect every year a salary survey of all of our exiting students going into the profession. This year, the range was 60,000 to 109,500. The average salary being right around 76,000. Holy smokes, you know, $20,000 more than the national average, $35,000 more than the Keene State College average.

Right? And these kids, these students, they're making like, you know, 75 graduating, but within three years they're already making six figures. Absolutely crazy. You know, how much money is out there in safety right now, especially in that three to five years of experience range. There's not a lot of people that are looking to jump into that particular market.

So the salaries increased a lot during that timeframe. At Keene State, we are big on construction, right? I have a construction safety program, but most of my students are just in the general safety program, where you can go into any industry, where industry agnostic, insurance, construction, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, DODA, aerospace, you name it, you can go do a job in that industry.

So, you know, we're not confined to this small market. Overall, the safety degree and the safety profession have an extremely high outlook. If you look at BLS data, in the next decade, we're projecting a 15% annual growth. If you look at other industries, they're sitting at 3 to 5%, and this is just for the safety specialists and technicians.

Imagine all the safety managers and safety directors, and chief safety officer positions that are coming up, too. Just to put that in perspective for you, we're gonna have about a 20,000 job opening every year for the next 10 years, we're gonna need to put people in about 20,000 different positions, and we graduate about a thousand safety students a year nationally at the undergraduate level.

If you want a job. Go to safety. If you want a high-paying job, go to safety. We have a hundred percent placement rate for students that want to join the safety profession. You know, we always have students that wanna transition into other roles and, you know, take other opportunities.

But you're gonna get yourself a job. And the profession itself doesn't just pay a lot. It also feels good. Your job is to protect the worker their life. Right?

We're trying to figure out how to save someone's life every day, right? So, you know, a lot of different things that, you know, obviously I'm biased, but I think the safety profession's really cool. It has a lot of good opportunities for one's future and something that you should really consider, even if you're considering the construction management path.

[00:35:24] David Tibbetts: I'm glad you touched on that at the end, 'cause yes, you will find a job. Yes, it will be a good-paying job, but it will also be a very rewarding job, both because of the mission but also because of the projects that you get to be a part of. And don't forget all of the relationships that you make along the way, which will become, you know, lifelong lasting relationships. And Corey, we touched on some different sectors, whether it was manufacturing or construction, but look at where you are now. Right? So you had a few different paths coming out of, to your point, Brady, of kind of industry agnostic and all the different opportunities. Corey just kind of rehash your path really quickly of the industry you started in, what you transitioned to, and where you sit now.

[00:36:06] Corey Silverman: Yeah, absolutely. So post-graduation, I worked for Amazon as a safety specialist. After about a year of that, like I said, I missed construction. It was always the topic I found most interesting. I had an internship in it that I really liked, so I moved on to a safety manager position with a large GC.

After doing that for a few years, I found that I was really interested in some of the technology that was emerging in the safety space, which is what led me to a role with a few other software companies and now with Highwire. So to that point, there's a need for safety expertise in roles other than an onsite safety manager, an onsite safety specialist. Like Brady said, the field is just growing so much, and there's a need for this knowledge, and you're not confined to being an on-site safety manager if your whole career in this path.

There's plenty of different opportunities you can take.

[00:36:48] David Tibbetts: Yeah, for sure. And again, one of the things that we've ended up doing on a lot of these podcasts is just generating that excitement, and we're generating that excitement around the safety profession right now.

But we talked about the construction management degree. We talked about the role of a superintendent or a field engineer. We mentioned project executives. Brady mentioned estimating. There's estimating, right? There's labor relations, there's procurement. There's so many different things that you can do in construction. Marketing, right?

There's anything you want to do, you can do in construction. We are never going to stop building, right? We are never going to stop having to keep people safe in any industry. So, I hope that comes across.

If you happen to be listening to this and you have a student in high school who's thinking about what they might want to do, hey, have 'em listen to a safety podcast, right? Open their eyes to a really great profession. And I think, uh, Brady, you did a great job of doing that today. Thank you for everything you're doing to continue to educate the next generation, and obviously with a very progressive mindset.

Thank you for sharing your perspective today.

[00:37:53] Brady Keene: As always, appreciate the conversation, and um maybe we can have another one again soon.

[00:37:58] David Tibbetts: We have, uh, no shortage of things to talk about, so thank you, Brady. Corey, thanks for joining, and thank you, everyone. Catch you on the next episode.