KATELYN HARADA
Job Title: Electrical Engineer (EIT)
Company: InPwr, Inc.
Location: Denver
Age: 24
Years on the Job: Three
Outside Interests: Doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles, spending time with her boyfriend and pets, and cooking her favorite Hawaiian and Asian recipes
A six-month internship at InPwr, Inc., a national design/build electrical contractor, led to a full-time job for Katelyn Harada, a graduate of Colorado State University.
Harada joined the electrical contracting world after being inspired by her father, who worked for WESCO Hawaii for 30 years, as well as friends and family members who have served as engineers.
“I owe my development as a design engineer in the electrical industry to many people in this field who contributed to raising me,” says Harada, a native of Honolulu.
On a typical day, Katelyn Harada reviews drawings for her team’s projects.
At the age of 24, she says she’s still new to the electrical world, but she is focusing on always learning. On a typical day, she focuses on such tasks as estimating bids, writing bid proposals, creating pre-construction designs, and handling vendor management for the office’s current bids and jobs.
Since the beginning of the year, she has also been heavily involved with the LEAN Construction Institute initiative to improve productivity. For example, she specializes in organizational planning, training, and providing support to the project managers, estimators, and engineers. In her role as a contributor/leader for the company’s initiative, she uses several technological programs to shave minutes off repetitive tasks completed by the entire company, resulting in overall efficiency and improved operations.
She says her company’s goal is to begin to shift the overall culture — across the Indianapolis and Denver offices — to become more focused on efficiency. That way, the company can work with its general contractors and customers who also implement the LEAN processes into their projects.
“Ultimately, we want to come away from our own projects with greater efficiency and reliability, expedited schedules and overall project value for our customers,” she says.
As a design engineer, Harada is involved in multiple aspects of estimating and design, but her favorite aspect of her job is helping her company grow.
“It is the most empowering feeling every time we are able to achieve our goals,” she says. “Whether it be through the LEAN committee or being awarded a project that’s larger than anything we’ve done before, it is so rewarding to see the resulting success.”
Harada and coworkers took home the"Excellence in Energy Construction" award at the 2018 IEC Rocky Mountain Summit Awards.
Currently, she says her company’s project base is booming more than ever before, and it has recently branched out into the world of military work. Harada has been involved in the 3D model coordination for InPwr, Inc.’s first confidential military project in Virginia, and the company was also just awarded more military projects, which will require heavy design coordination.
“These military projects escalated our company’s growth, which makes being involved the most rewarding feeling,” she says.
Clint Wright, vice president of operations for InPwr, says Harada has embraced every opportunity to produce, learn, and lead. Case in point: She is a key member of a four-person team who completed nearly $120 million of estimates resulting in $30 million of awarded work, all in her first 14 months on the job.
“Katelyn efficiently manages massive amounts of military design/build documentation, estimating new design build opportunities, and effectively extrapolating job cost and labor analysis to support project management,” Wright says.
