This is my margin trowl. And you always know a finisher because we've we've got him in our back pockets sticking out. And it's such a small tool, but you just use this all the time when you're pouring concrete, ees to scrape your forms, use it to get in little corners that maybe your other trials are too big for. So you can always tell a finisher by the margin trowl. When Liz Nichols was in her twenties, she knew that she wanted two things financial stability and to start a family, but she had no roadmap to help her achieve those goals. That is until the day she met a guide who would show her a new world of work. In this episode of I'm the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll hear a story about shattering expectations in order to find meaningful work. If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find more information at express prose dot com. Um Now producer Chris Siegel has the story of Liz Nichols. It's early in the morning, I'm in Northwest Portland, in a neighborhood where new developments are springing up like dandelions. I parked behind a beat up old truck, a nine Toyota that belongs to my friend Liz. How's work going so far? This morning? While most of Portland is waking up, Liz has been at work for a couple hours. She greets me in her loose, dirty jeans and union hoodie. Under her chin, she has what's called a particulate respirator. It's like the construction workers version of a surgical mask. Liz is a journeyman cement mason, and today she's working in a half finished building. There's some sheet metal guys, some electricians running wire. But yeah, there's we got just different trades people were kind of working around. As a woman in the trades, Liz has certainly taken an unusual path. Only three percent of people working on constructions sights are women. That means for every one hundred plumbers or carpenters or mechanics, only about three of them are women. But since she was a child growing up in Massachusetts, she's always been a bit of a contrarian. This one time, my father took me in my siblings to the fire station and Waltham because one of my mom's cousins was a firefighter, and it was a bunch of guys, and I remember very clearly as nine or ten, asking if there were any women firefighters, and they said there had never been a woman firefighter in the history of wealthy and firefighting. And at that moment I wanted to be a firefighter really badly. But the expectations that were placed on Liz by her family, by society and culture, they had her pointing in a different direction. You go to college and then magically you figure it out. You go to college and you come out and people will pay you good money to do things. And so I didn't I think twice such as go to college, go to college. I wasn't very academically motivated or talented in high school. And now that I know, there's all these great jobs out there that you don't need a college degree. Four. If I could go back in time, if I had a time and sheet, I would not have attended college. Liz was an English and history major, and while she dreamed of a career in writing, she struggled to pass her classes. She couldn't stay focused, She'd fall asleep during lectures and then have trouble catching up. But she learned one thing. The summer before my senior year of college, I worked on a fruit and vegetable farm on Martha's vineyard, and it was awesome and it was sort of my first taste of manual labor. And I loved it. I loved working outdoors. I you know, loved feeling strong and muscular from busting ass all day. It was a minor miracle that she made it through college, she tells me. An adviser of hers basically dragged her to graduation day. After college, she got by on a combination of gardening and landscaping jobs and serving coffee. It wasn't going to make her rich, but she was content. She had a good life and a loving partner. But then I was suddenly it was in my late twenties, and I knew I wanted a kid. And that was sort of the aha moment of like, I need health insurance, I need benefits, I need a wage that will support a family. I've always loved sports, so I found a physical therapy assistant program and uh, it was a two year program and you'd come out making forty dollars a year, which sounded like so much money to me at the time, and I thought, Okay, yeah, that's something I can do, and I took one anatomy and physiology class. She thought maybe this time she'd be successful at school. But I ended up trying in my car one day after class and realizing that it's you know, it wasn't that I was immature, it wasn't that I was late. Easy is that I'm just not I just don't do well in an academic setting, and that's not how I learned. And I dropped the class and then really started to panic. To Liz, there was no way forward the life where she starts a family, where she has financial stability. She couldn't see that life. She spent about a year in this cycle, comfortable but feeling like there was a hole and she could be doing more. But when she least expected it, a short, white haired woman named Dolores would walk into a coffee shop Lizza is working at and change everything. There was a regular customer who was an electrician, and she was a woman, and I was talking to her one day and she told me about Oregon tradeswoman and she talked about how being an electrician had changed her life and the quality quality of life. She was able to provide for her two children and her partner. And this was someone telling me she um worked in construction and made eighty thousand dollars a year and had health insurance and would receive a pension when she retired. And it just sort of like bells were going off, and I was like, that's what I want, that's what I want to do. Dolores brought the change Liz was searching for. After a Google search for Oregon Trades Women, Liz was sold a world of meaningful work was starting to open up to her. Jobs like welder or electrician, or crane operator or wind turbine technician, where all of a sudden, jobs that she could see herself doing. Shortly after the coffee shop conversation, she signed up for the training with Oregon Trades Women. I met Liz a few years ago when she went through our program. That's Amy Jane Neil, she runs the training program at Oregon Trades Women. The mission of Oregon Trades Women is to serve women and girls to think about careers and skilled trades. And that's their executive director Kelly coopcheck. I met Kelly and Amy at their office on a busy street in northeast Portland, located half a block from my favorite hardware store. When Liz arrived at Oregon Trades Women, she had a lot to learn. Day one was like, let's look at a tape measure. If someone says five and three, eight's like, you can find five and three. It's on the tape measure really quickly and hitting a nail with a hammer and not missing the nail. You know, there's lots of no tap tap tapping. I don't want to hear the tap tap tapping, Like swing and hit that nail. But Amy and Kelly recognize that for a woman to make it in the trades, she needs to have training with a variety of tools and not just the physical ones they use on the job. Men are better equipped for this male dominated industry to succeed. So our program sort of bridges that divide. So we equip our students, graduates of our program with tools to to fit into this male dominated culture and to succeed. Throughout the program, Amy saw Liz transform and she was a really different person than that she is now. She's got the same heart She's got the same drive, but her level of confidence, her understanding of her own value worth, and she's ripped now she's strong. After the training, Liz was excited to work. The next step for her was finding an apprenticeship, only she didn't know what apprenticeship program to join. It just so happened that the Cement Mason's Union, the tradespeople who make our sidewalks and building floors possible, was hosting an apprentice recruitment training, so she thought why not and signed up. I spent a week at this met Mason's training center where we know built forms and we poured concrete, and I was just trying to impress everyone. I just really, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I know I knew that I wanted everyone to want to hire me. So I was, you know, filling up the wheelbarrow twice as full as everyone else and running them back and forth. And at one point during the class, I smashed my thumb with a sledgehammer and was bleeding everywhere and just kept working and they didn't notice until I just very casually asked for a band it and they saw that my thumb was just like black and blue and bleading. Her hard work and grit didn't go unnoticed by the leaders of the union. At the end of the training, they pulled her aside and they offered me a job. They said, we want you in our apprenticeship. You can go to work Monday if this is what you want. The door was finally opening for Liz, a rewarding job with good pay, the pieces of the puzzle that she needed to start a family. She accepted the job with the Cement Mason Union. And then once I had an apprenticeship and it was scheduled like Okay, you're going to work Monday, that was sort of like I'm gonna walk on the job and they're gonna know I'm a fraud. They're gonna know, like I've never done anything like this. It's time for Liz to go to work. How does she fare on the job? Find out after a short break. You're listening to independent producer Chris Siegel and the story of Cement Mason Liz nichols Um. The job is brought to you by Express Employment for Esstionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals seeking a skilled labor position or administrative ortment, and maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open doors for you to go to express pros dot com to find a location near you. Now back to the story of Liz Nichols. Before the break, she had finished cement mason training and was gearing up for her first day at work. I get nervous standing around, like, um, you always want to be doing something and grab something clean something. Liz feels right at home amongst the various trades people putting together this building. While talking with me, she continually scans for jobs to do. I ask her questions in between mixing concrete, sweeping and priming the floor. So, how does work. Do you see a job and you just do it? Or were you like assigned to do that room? Um? Today, it's kind of we all know what needs to get done, so I thought needed to be primed and just jumped on it. At one point, she leaves me mid sentence to carry a couple fifty pound bags of cement over to the mixer. But when she first started as an apprentice, work wasn't always this smooth. There's this one day we were pouring a section of street and there was rebar in the concrete. So you're walking on the rebar, you're bouncing on the rebar, and we're pouring the concrete, you know, a couple of feet deep, and at some point the rebar has covered, so you're just walking in the concrete. You can't see where your feet are going, and you're balancing on this rebar. And I was wearing this backpack vibrator, so we have these, you know, vibrators as this long wand and it, you know, you dip it into the concrete. You're consolidating the concrete around the reb bar, and it's you know, it's like this fifty pound backpack I'm wearing. Yeah, this is going where you think it's going. And I just tripped and fell backwards, just wiped out, laying there like a snow angel on the concrete. And my foreman came up and he put his arm out to pull me up, and I just pulled him down into the concrete and now we're boling in the concrete and you know, someone else has to come and they help us. So I'm just soaked through. And my boss was like, you know, just go home. You're covering to night. So I, you know, got in my car and I'm just so humiliated. And I spent all weekend like they're gonna fire me, They're gonna think I'm an idiot, this and that. Despite her belief that she would soon be out of work, Liz was in for a surprise first thing Monday morning when she returned to the job site and a guy from another crew came up and said, hey, I heard your fall on the concrete and proceeded to tell me his first falling in the concrete story. And then I realized it was this write of passage. As an apprentice, she was the new person on the job, but on top of that, she'd be on construction sites where she'd meet guys who had never worked with a woman. She received a lot of attention. I definitely felt more like I was under an X ray, like just walking across the job site and feeling like every single person is staring at me. Sometimes it just makes me feel like I'm a unicorn or and some like mythological creature and some of the things that she heard while at work. Let me do that for you. Hey, you look good when you're doing that. What does your husband think of you doing this work? Oh? I heard about you. I would never let my wife do this. Oh I'm joking. I'm joking. Oh, you can take a joke. I had a foreman once. Uh tell me, like, sure, you can handle this work now, but your body is going to break down faster than our bodies because you don't have testosterone. And if you look at the science, like women live longer than men, you know, it's just like we're is he even pulling that out of So we got into it a little bit. We've got into a fight about that one. What she could use in those type situations is support from some of the guys on the crew. The next day, one of my corkers came up to me and said, Hey, you know what he said to you yesterday. That wasn't right. None of us feel that way. And when I went home that day, I just kept thinking, why didn't you tell him? Why in the moment, why didn't you stand up and say that if you want to be on my team. Be on my team. Hopefully the next time he witnesses something like that, he'll feel more comfortable saying, hey, that's not right. She pushed back against this foreman. But Liz doesn't always feel like she can speak her mind. If you let things roll off your shoulders, people like you more like the crew accepts you. She's cool. Oh no, no, she's cool out here that time. Oh she's cool. You can you can say stuff in front of Liz, and it leads to this awkward place where I want to be accepted and I want to fit in and I want to feel like one of the crew. But you know, where do you draw the line of like, actually, you can't say that to me. You can't just pass it off as a joke. Experiences like these they touched Liz now more than ever after a recent development in her life, her dream of having a baby, well, she's accomplished that. She gave birth to her son, Shamus nichols Kirk near the end of her three year apprenticeship. M my baby. I thought I was gonna have a daughter, and I thought I was going to raise this little tomboy hellion, And I realized if I had a daughter, I would dress her, you know, I address her in blue, I address her and green. I would very proudly have like this gender neutral girl and try and teach her to be an empowered woman. And and I had a son. She had a son who she knows will eventually grow up to be a man. She doesn't have the manufacturers instructions on how to raise a sensitive, thoughtful son, so she looks back to her experience on the construction site for ideas. I'm going to try and teach him to speak out if he sees something that makes him uncomfortable, to not be um the guy who comes up to me the day after something happens and says he's sorry, and you know it's not right. I want Shamus to be the type of person who, in the moment says, hey, that's that's not right. As Shamus grows up, she wants to teach him the value of hard work. I really want him to it's crying right now. Uh. I want him to know that my job is hard but satisfying, and that I can provide the life that I'm providing for him through that hard work. There was an occasion for Liz where her two lives, her life as a worker and her life as a mother, came together. She was at the end of her apprenticeship and needed to take a test to graduate and become a journeyman cement mason. I took it this July and I was still on maternity leave, so I actually to bring Shamus with me to the hall, and the apprentice instructor and all of the office guys babysat for me while I was taking the exam. So I was building forms and pouring concrete and finishing, and then you know, all these guys were just mooning over my baby Liz. Past the exam. They have a door that they have all the new journeyman's signed, and I got to hold Sheamus while I was signing the door, and it was this wonderful, full circle moment of I got into this trade because I wanted to have a baby one day and to journey out holding my child. That this job and this you know, living wage made possible. It was just a really cool moment. That's Liz Nichols, a journeyman cement mason and mother, living and working in Portland, Oregon. That was independent producer Chris Siegel with the story of Cement Mason, Liz Nichols, and that's all for this edition of On the Job from a Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express prose dot com, and you can listen to every podcast this season at Express prose dot com slash podcast. This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Mencher for Mensch Media, I Heart Radio and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on I Heart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review which helps other folks find us, and of course you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time, On the Job.

This is my margin trowl. And you always know a finisher because we've we've got him in our back pockets sticking out. And it's such a small tool, but you just use this all the time when you're pouring concrete, ees to scrape your forms, use it to get in little corners that maybe your other trials are too big for. So you can always tell a finisher by the margin trowl. When Liz Nichols was in her twenties, she knew that she wanted two things financial stability and to start a family, but she had no roadmap to help her achieve those goals. That is until the day she met a guide who would show her a new world of work. In this episode of I'm the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll hear a story about shattering expectations in order to find meaningful work. If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. Find more information at express prose dot com. Um Now producer Chris Siegel has the story of Liz Nichols. It's early in the morning, I'm in Northwest Portland, in a neighborhood where new developments are springing up like dandelions. I parked behind a beat up old truck, a nine Toyota that belongs to my friend Liz. How's work going so far? This morning? While most of Portland is waking up, Liz has been at work for a couple hours. She greets me in her loose, dirty jeans and union hoodie. Under her chin, she has what's called a particulate respirator. It's like the construction workers version of a surgical mask. Liz is a journeyman cement mason, and today she's working in a half finished building. There's some sheet metal guys, some electricians running wire. But yeah, there's we got just different trades people were kind of working around. As a woman in the trades, Liz has certainly taken an unusual path. Only three percent of people working on constructions sights are women. That means for every one hundred plumbers or carpenters or mechanics, only about three of them are women. But since she was a child growing up in Massachusetts, she's always been a bit of a contrarian. This one time, my father took me in my siblings to the fire station and Waltham because one of my mom's cousins was a firefighter, and it was a bunch of guys, and I remember very clearly as nine or ten, asking if there were any women firefighters, and they said there had never been a woman firefighter in the history of wealthy and firefighting. And at that moment I wanted to be a firefighter really badly. But the expectations that were placed on Liz by her family, by society and culture, they had her pointing in a different direction. You go to college and then magically you figure it out. You go to college and you come out and people will pay you good money to do things. And so I didn't I think twice such as go to college, go to college. I wasn't very academically motivated or talented in high school. And now that I know, there's all these great jobs out there that you don't need a college degree. Four. If I could go back in time, if I had a time and sheet, I would not have attended college. Liz was an English and history major, and while she dreamed of a career in writing, she struggled to pass her classes. She couldn't stay focused, She'd fall asleep during lectures and then have trouble catching up. But she learned one thing. The summer before my senior year of college, I worked on a fruit and vegetable farm on Martha's vineyard, and it was awesome and it was sort of my first taste of manual labor. And I loved it. I loved working outdoors. I you know, loved feeling strong and muscular from busting ass all day. It was a minor miracle that she made it through college, she tells me. An adviser of hers basically dragged her to graduation day. After college, she got by on a combination of gardening and landscaping jobs and serving coffee. It wasn't going to make her rich, but she was content. She had a good life and a loving partner. But then I was suddenly it was in my late twenties, and I knew I wanted a kid. And that was sort of the aha moment of like, I need health insurance, I need benefits, I need a wage that will support a family. I've always loved sports, so I found a physical therapy assistant program and uh, it was a two year program and you'd come out making forty dollars a year, which sounded like so much money to me at the time, and I thought, Okay, yeah, that's something I can do, and I took one anatomy and physiology class. She thought maybe this time she'd be successful at school. But I ended up trying in my car one day after class and realizing that it's you know, it wasn't that I was immature, it wasn't that I was late. Easy is that I'm just not I just don't do well in an academic setting, and that's not how I learned. And I dropped the class and then really started to panic. To Liz, there was no way forward the life where she starts a family, where she has financial stability. She couldn't see that life. She spent about a year in this cycle, comfortable but feeling like there was a hole and she could be doing more. But when she least expected it, a short, white haired woman named Dolores would walk into a coffee shop Lizza is working at and change everything. There was a regular customer who was an electrician, and she was a woman, and I was talking to her one day and she told me about Oregon tradeswoman and she talked about how being an electrician had changed her life and the quality quality of life. She was able to provide for her two children and her partner. And this was someone telling me she um worked in construction and made eighty thousand dollars a year and had health insurance and would receive a pension when she retired. And it just sort of like bells were going off, and I was like, that's what I want, that's what I want to do. Dolores brought the change Liz was searching for. After a Google search for Oregon Trades Women, Liz was sold a world of meaningful work was starting to open up to her. Jobs like welder or electrician, or crane operator or wind turbine technician, where all of a sudden, jobs that she could see herself doing. Shortly after the coffee shop conversation, she signed up for the training with Oregon Trades Women. I met Liz a few years ago when she went through our program. That's Amy Jane Neil, she runs the training program at Oregon Trades Women. The mission of Oregon Trades Women is to serve women and girls to think about careers and skilled trades. And that's their executive director Kelly coopcheck. I met Kelly and Amy at their office on a busy street in northeast Portland, located half a block from my favorite hardware store. When Liz arrived at Oregon Trades Women, she had a lot to learn. Day one was like, let's look at a tape measure. If someone says five and three, eight's like, you can find five and three. It's on the tape measure really quickly and hitting a nail with a hammer and not missing the nail. You know, there's lots of no tap tap tapping. I don't want to hear the tap tap tapping, Like swing and hit that nail. But Amy and Kelly recognize that for a woman to make it in the trades, she needs to have training with a variety of tools and not just the physical ones they use on the job. Men are better equipped for this male dominated industry to succeed. So our program sort of bridges that divide. So we equip our students, graduates of our program with tools to to fit into this male dominated culture and to succeed. Throughout the program, Amy saw Liz transform and she was a really different person than that she is now. She's got the same heart She's got the same drive, but her level of confidence, her understanding of her own value worth, and she's ripped now she's strong. After the training, Liz was excited to work. The next step for her was finding an apprenticeship, only she didn't know what apprenticeship program to join. It just so happened that the Cement Mason's Union, the tradespeople who make our sidewalks and building floors possible, was hosting an apprentice recruitment training, so she thought why not and signed up. I spent a week at this met Mason's training center where we know built forms and we poured concrete, and I was just trying to impress everyone. I just really, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I know I knew that I wanted everyone to want to hire me. So I was, you know, filling up the wheelbarrow twice as full as everyone else and running them back and forth. And at one point during the class, I smashed my thumb with a sledgehammer and was bleeding everywhere and just kept working and they didn't notice until I just very casually asked for a band it and they saw that my thumb was just like black and blue and bleading. Her hard work and grit didn't go unnoticed by the leaders of the union. At the end of the training, they pulled her aside and they offered me a job. They said, we want you in our apprenticeship. You can go to work Monday if this is what you want. The door was finally opening for Liz, a rewarding job with good pay, the pieces of the puzzle that she needed to start a family. She accepted the job with the Cement Mason Union. And then once I had an apprenticeship and it was scheduled like Okay, you're going to work Monday, that was sort of like I'm gonna walk on the job and they're gonna know I'm a fraud. They're gonna know, like I've never done anything like this. It's time for Liz to go to work. How does she fare on the job? Find out after a short break. You're listening to independent producer Chris Siegel and the story of Cement Mason Liz nichols Um. The job is brought to you by Express Employment for Esstionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals seeking a skilled labor position or administrative ortment, and maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open doors for you to go to express pros dot com to find a location near you. Now back to the story of Liz Nichols. Before the break, she had finished cement mason training and was gearing up for her first day at work. I get nervous standing around, like, um, you always want to be doing something and grab something clean something. Liz feels right at home amongst the various trades people putting together this building. While talking with me, she continually scans for jobs to do. I ask her questions in between mixing concrete, sweeping and priming the floor. So, how does work. Do you see a job and you just do it? Or were you like assigned to do that room? Um? Today, it's kind of we all know what needs to get done, so I thought needed to be primed and just jumped on it. At one point, she leaves me mid sentence to carry a couple fifty pound bags of cement over to the mixer. But when she first started as an apprentice, work wasn't always this smooth. There's this one day we were pouring a section of street and there was rebar in the concrete. So you're walking on the rebar, you're bouncing on the rebar, and we're pouring the concrete, you know, a couple of feet deep, and at some point the rebar has covered, so you're just walking in the concrete. You can't see where your feet are going, and you're balancing on this rebar. And I was wearing this backpack vibrator, so we have these, you know, vibrators as this long wand and it, you know, you dip it into the concrete. You're consolidating the concrete around the reb bar, and it's you know, it's like this fifty pound backpack I'm wearing. Yeah, this is going where you think it's going. And I just tripped and fell backwards, just wiped out, laying there like a snow angel on the concrete. And my foreman came up and he put his arm out to pull me up, and I just pulled him down into the concrete and now we're boling in the concrete and you know, someone else has to come and they help us. So I'm just soaked through. And my boss was like, you know, just go home. You're covering to night. So I, you know, got in my car and I'm just so humiliated. And I spent all weekend like they're gonna fire me, They're gonna think I'm an idiot, this and that. Despite her belief that she would soon be out of work, Liz was in for a surprise first thing Monday morning when she returned to the job site and a guy from another crew came up and said, hey, I heard your fall on the concrete and proceeded to tell me his first falling in the concrete story. And then I realized it was this write of passage. As an apprentice, she was the new person on the job, but on top of that, she'd be on construction sites where she'd meet guys who had never worked with a woman. She received a lot of attention. I definitely felt more like I was under an X ray, like just walking across the job site and feeling like every single person is staring at me. Sometimes it just makes me feel like I'm a unicorn or and some like mythological creature and some of the things that she heard while at work. Let me do that for you. Hey, you look good when you're doing that. What does your husband think of you doing this work? Oh? I heard about you. I would never let my wife do this. Oh I'm joking. I'm joking. Oh, you can take a joke. I had a foreman once. Uh tell me, like, sure, you can handle this work now, but your body is going to break down faster than our bodies because you don't have testosterone. And if you look at the science, like women live longer than men, you know, it's just like we're is he even pulling that out of So we got into it a little bit. We've got into a fight about that one. What she could use in those type situations is support from some of the guys on the crew. The next day, one of my corkers came up to me and said, Hey, you know what he said to you yesterday. That wasn't right. None of us feel that way. And when I went home that day, I just kept thinking, why didn't you tell him? Why in the moment, why didn't you stand up and say that if you want to be on my team. Be on my team. Hopefully the next time he witnesses something like that, he'll feel more comfortable saying, hey, that's not right. She pushed back against this foreman. But Liz doesn't always feel like she can speak her mind. If you let things roll off your shoulders, people like you more like the crew accepts you. She's cool. Oh no, no, she's cool out here that time. Oh she's cool. You can you can say stuff in front of Liz, and it leads to this awkward place where I want to be accepted and I want to fit in and I want to feel like one of the crew. But you know, where do you draw the line of like, actually, you can't say that to me. You can't just pass it off as a joke. Experiences like these they touched Liz now more than ever after a recent development in her life, her dream of having a baby, well, she's accomplished that. She gave birth to her son, Shamus nichols Kirk near the end of her three year apprenticeship. M my baby. I thought I was gonna have a daughter, and I thought I was going to raise this little tomboy hellion, And I realized if I had a daughter, I would dress her, you know, I address her in blue, I address her and green. I would very proudly have like this gender neutral girl and try and teach her to be an empowered woman. And and I had a son. She had a son who she knows will eventually grow up to be a man. She doesn't have the manufacturers instructions on how to raise a sensitive, thoughtful son, so she looks back to her experience on the construction site for ideas. I'm going to try and teach him to speak out if he sees something that makes him uncomfortable, to not be um the guy who comes up to me the day after something happens and says he's sorry, and you know it's not right. I want Shamus to be the type of person who, in the moment says, hey, that's that's not right. As Shamus grows up, she wants to teach him the value of hard work. I really want him to it's crying right now. Uh. I want him to know that my job is hard but satisfying, and that I can provide the life that I'm providing for him through that hard work. There was an occasion for Liz where her two lives, her life as a worker and her life as a mother, came together. She was at the end of her apprenticeship and needed to take a test to graduate and become a journeyman cement mason. I took it this July and I was still on maternity leave, so I actually to bring Shamus with me to the hall, and the apprentice instructor and all of the office guys babysat for me while I was taking the exam. So I was building forms and pouring concrete and finishing, and then you know, all these guys were just mooning over my baby Liz. Past the exam. They have a door that they have all the new journeyman's signed, and I got to hold Sheamus while I was signing the door, and it was this wonderful, full circle moment of I got into this trade because I wanted to have a baby one day and to journey out holding my child. That this job and this you know, living wage made possible. It was just a really cool moment. That's Liz Nichols, a journeyman cement mason and mother, living and working in Portland, Oregon. That was independent producer Chris Siegel with the story of Cement Mason, Liz Nichols, and that's all for this edition of On the Job from a Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express prose dot com, and you can listen to every podcast this season at Express prose dot com slash podcast. This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Mencher for Mensch Media, I Heart Radio and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on I Heart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review which helps other folks find us, and of course you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time, On the Job.