Maura Alwyen.com

Experienced self-starter with the motivation to grasp and master new skill sets while focusing on continuous improvement. Over 30 years of experience in successful project execution by motivating and mentoring multi-layer teams and working side by side with them. Detail, time, and budget oriented while producing outcomes that exceed expectations in a customer-centric industry.

I'm looking to exit the male dominated maintenance field.

Experience has been my teacher with my career so far. Building maintenance is customer service that involves resolving issues in real time, maintaining vendor management, scheduling crews, submitting proposals, RFQs, and data entry. Clear concise communication is also at the forefront of keeping customers happy. From this I have great people skills, computer skills, time management, and the ability to shift gears and refocus teams. I feel these skills translate quite well into many other areas of business administration and customer service.

The problem is bots, AI, and even people don't see that on my resume, all they see is blue collar attributes that they aren't taking the time to consider. How many people like myself who have been forged in the fires of in person client facing customer service are overlooked because they haven't sat at a desk and done that?

In what I hope to be my former field of work, I had to deal with tenants who had flooded kitchens because something broke loose, or who had eight inches of sewage in their basement and if you want a rightfully confrontational client they had every right to be upset, but it was my job to get them calmed down, get my team in, and make things right. Building maintenance is a carefully choreographed dance between proactive and reactive tasks. It means talking someone through how to light a pilot on a furnace or a water-heater at six in the morning on a Saturday, during a snowstorm. It involves working around pets that want to stick their noses into what you are doing–carrying treats helped on this. It meant explaining why something happened to a client in such a way they can understand and not feel blamed–even if they caused the issue.

It meant patient teaching of technicians sometimes from the other side of the city via phone, text, and pictures when they were in over their heads, but they had to fake it to get the job done.  Keeping seven people with a diverse set of skills on task, on time, and busy; while knowing each of their strengths and weaknesses. Keeping track of their purchases, ensuring they were getting the correct parts for the task and that those parts were billed to the correct property.

So yeah, a lot of things that algorithms and even people fail to see.