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VDOTer in Profile
Bulletin
March - April 2007, Vol. 73, No. 2
In this issue:
Home | Work Zone Awareness | Commissioner's Column | Tech-Bytes | Humor | News Briefs
Career Moves | All in the Family | Best Practices | Answer File | VDOTer in Profile
VDOTer in Profile
It’s in maintenance …
Looking for the right career ‘fit’
This Williamsburg Residency manager found all the challenges
of maintenance to suit her to a transportation “t.”
Tracy Lassiter at work in the Williamsburg Residency
Tracy Lassiter’s VDOT career had a rocky beginning, metaphorically speaking. Her first job, back in 1987, was washing stones, or what technicians call “aggregate,” in a big pan at the Elko Materials Laboratory. By removing all dirt and grit from the rocks, she prepared them for tests that determined how well they would serve in concrete and asphalt. She also helped with lab tests and she enjoyed her work.
Lassiter didn’t know then that her lab technicians job was giving her experience—literally from the rocky ground up—for a career in maintenance.
The day came, however, when she thought, “I don’t feel marketable for a better job.” Soon thereafter she began her pursuit of a job with the “right fit.” In time, after a series of initiatives, Lassiter reached her present position of transportation operations manager at Williamsburg Residency. Her role? Supervising maintenance activities.
While still at Elko, Lassiter wanted to prepare herself for a new job. She volunteered to work an hour every day for free at Sandston Residency after she got off work at Elko—“just to learn residency operations.” Overtime regulations prevented that, so she borrowed a book on FMS II from a coworker and studied it thoroughly. When a job came open as a contract administrator at Sandston Residency, she applied, even though she had heard that they were looking for a construction inspector for the position.
As it turned out, no inspectors wanted to give up valuable overtime pay to move to the job and Lassiter landed it. The final question in the interview was: “What do you know about FMSII?” She hit that one out of the park.
When she learned she had the job, she thought, “I’ve got to buy some clothes; all I have is holey T-shirts from lab work.” She also remembers, “I was scared to death” of measuring up in a new job. But her fear of growing stagnant in a career was stronger than her fear of change. So she “embraced the fear” and launched into her new work. Since then, she says there have been a series of “outstanding opportunities for me” at VDOT.
As contract administrator for secondary construction, she crunched budget numbers for secondary road plans and budgets and followed expenditures all the way through each project. She took night classes at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College to earn a certificate in civil engineering technology. She was beginning to get on a roll.
When Sandston Residency moved Lassiter from construction to maintenance contract administration, she thought, “This feels like the right fit.”
More opportunities opened up. She was put in charge of a maintenance specialty crew caring for park-and-ride lots and high-profile roadsides such as those near Richmond International Airport. She also handled citizen complaints. When the maintenance operations manager had surgery, she took his place for three months. When the assistant resident engineer was gone for six weeks, she filled that job.
At that point, she realized, “I love maintenance…. I belong in maintenance!”
Last April, after nine years at Sandston, Lassiter took the next big step, moving to her present job in Williamsburg Residency where she oversees the work of three area headquarters—Seaford, Croaker and Williamsburg—in James City and York counties, and she “loves it.”
Asked why maintenance is so rewarding to her, Lassiter ticks off the reasons. She likes answering and solving citizens’ concerns and “fixing things for people.” She enjoys working with employees, especially when she can help a discouraged or unhappy one to see things positively. And she enjoys managing assets and budgets—“making numbers come out right, like a puzzle.”
She also thrives on making projections for maintenance jobs: “What materials will we need? What equipment? How many employees? How much time?”
It’s one big moving puzzle of backhoes, pickups, tractors, loaders, chippers, graders, snow plows, gravel, sand, asphalt—and of course people. Fortunately, Lassiter’s aptitudes tie right in with VDOT’s new Asset Management System.
Best of all, she says, “Every day is different!” And that’s just the way she likes it.
