Director of Construction Job Description

A Director of Construction owns the delivery side of a building program. Project managers and superintendents run individual jobs; the director decides how those jobs get staffed, contracted, priced, reported and closed out, and answers for the whole portfolio when one of them slips. The title appears on both sides of the contract. On the owner side, a hospital system, university, retailer, developer or city hires a director to spend its capital well. On the contractor side, a general contractor or construction management firm puts a director over a group of project teams in a region or market sector.

Owner-side work starts before design is finished. The director picks the delivery method for each project, whether design-bid-build, construction manager at risk with a guaranteed maximum price, or design-build, then runs contractor prequalification, interviews and the negotiation of the GMP or lump-sum agreement. During design, the director pushes for constructability reviews and value engineering so cost problems surface while they are still lines on a drawing. Once crews mobilize, the job becomes change-order approvals, pay application review, schedule recovery meetings and monthly reports to a capital committee or board.

A public example shows the scope on the owner side. The City of Fayetteville's classification for its Construction Management & Capital Projects Director, revised August 6, 2026, has the position manage all capital facility construction projects for the city, help develop the annual Capital Improvement Program, negotiate and administer contracts, keep spending within approved budgets, supervise staff and oversee the facilities management team. The position takes administrative direction from an Assistant City Manager and keeps council members, stakeholders and the public informed on major projects.

Contractor-side directors carry a different scorecard: project margin, backlog, safety record and repeat clients. They assign project managers and superintendents to jobs, sign off on estimates and buyout before a bid or GMP goes out, review monthly cost reports for fee fade, and step into owner disputes before they harden into claims. In both settings, the director has to know which project manager is understating risk and which superintendent can pull a late job back onto its baseline.

The tools are the ones project teams use, seen from one level up. Portfolio dashboards pull from project management platforms such as Procore or Autodesk Construction Cloud, schedules live in Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project, and cost reports come out of the accounting system. A director rarely builds a CPM schedule from scratch, but has to read one well enough to spot a broken logic tie or float that vanished between updates.

O*NET lists "Construction Director" as an alternate title for construction managers, the same occupation that holds construction project managers and construction superintendents. That is why the pay figures on this page describe the whole occupation rather than directors alone.

Directors usually come up through project management or field supervision rather than straight out of school. As a rough guide, expect 10 to 15 years in construction before a director title, with several of those years spent managing other project managers or superintendents. The record matters more than the path: a candidate who has carried a large project from preconstruction through closeout, while leading people, reads as ready.

Education. A bachelor's degree in civil engineering, construction management, architecture or a related field is the typical starting point. Fayetteville's class specification shows how one public owner frames it: a bachelor's in civil engineering, architecture, construction management or a directly related field, plus seven years of increasingly responsible experience in construction or project management with four years of supervision, while accepting any combination of experience and training that provides the required knowledge. Developer and real estate employers may also look for finance skills, so an MBA or real estate coursework can help on that side.

Credentials. No single credential defines the job, but several carry weight with employers:

• Certified Construction Manager (CCM), awarded by the Construction Manager Certification Institute, an independent administrative body of the Construction Management Association of America.
• Designated Design-Build Professional (DBIA), administered by the Design-Build Certification Board. Candidates complete a core curriculum and pass an exam covering design-build principles, contracting methods and project execution. A companion credential, Assoc. DBIA, is for practitioners who cannot yet show the required hands-on design-build experience.
• Project Management Professional (PMP), from the Project Management Institute.
• Professional Engineer (PE) license, issued by state engineering licensing boards, useful on infrastructure and public programs.
• LEED AP, awarded by Green Business Certification Inc., for programs with green building targets.
• Certified Professional Constructor (CPC), awarded by the American Institute of Constructors through its Constructor Certification Commission.

The Fayetteville specification lists a PE or architect license, the CCM, the PMP and LEED as preferred rather than required.

Skills that separate directors. Contract fluency comes first: AIA and ConsensusDocs forms, GMP contingency rules, allowances, liquidated damages and notice provisions. Financial reading comes next, from cost-to-complete forecasts to an owner's pro forma or a contractor's fee and fade. Then people: hiring project managers, moving them off failing jobs and building the next tier of leaders. Directors who report to boards or councils also need to explain a schedule delay in plain language without burying the bad news, and to defend a contingency draw before the people who approved the budget.

Directors draw from the same labor pool as the broader construction manager occupation, and the federal outlook for that occupation is strong. O*NET rates projected growth for construction managers from 2025 to 2035 as much faster than average, 7% or higher, with about 49,700 openings a year on average. Those openings span every level of the occupation, from assistant project managers to executives, so they say little about how many director seats open in a given year.

BLS estimated 380,360 construction managers in its May 2025 wage survey, and pay shifts with the setting. In nonresidential building construction, the industry that includes commercial and institutional general contractors, the occupation's median was $126,690. In real estate, the sector that includes owners who lease out buildings and the firms that manage them, the median was $148,590. In local government, excluding schools and hospitals, it was $120,840. BLS does not report director pay separately, so an individual offer depends on the size of the program, the region and how any bonus is structured.

Public classifications add a reference point. Fayetteville's Construction Management & Capital Projects Director class carries an annual range of $120,166 to $187,459. That is one city's schedule, an example rather than a national benchmark.

Another 2026 development is in the software stack around the job. In July 2026, BRG surveyed 109 construction and development executives involved in their organizations' AI efforts, 58 on the builder side and 51 on the owner side, and its report centers on the North American responses. Only 15% said AI was fully integrated across projects and operations, and project management and scheduling was implemented at 52% of respondents. BRG reads the early workforce effect as more about reorganizing teams than eliminating positions: 46% had changed how teams are structured and 38% had reskilled or retrained existing employees, while 18% added headcount in certain areas and 11% reduced it.

For a director, that means owning the rules as much as the tools. Someone has to decide which AI-drafted estimates, schedule forecasts or contract summaries get a human check before they reach an owner or a board, and who signs that check. Those calls sit with the person accountable for the portfolio.

The route up runs through senior project management, operations management or an owner's representative seat at a program management firm. From director, the next steps include vice president of construction or operations, chief operating officer at a contractor, or head of facilities and capital planning at an institution. Moving between sides is a real option: contractor experience is useful to an owner hiring someone to manage contractors, and owner experience helps a contractor that wants to win institutional clients. Portable credentials, such as the CCM or the DBIA, travel with the person across both.

Dear Ms. Alvarez,

I would like to be considered for Ridgeview Health's Director of Construction role, which I saw on your careers page last week. For the past six years I have led a team of four project managers and two superintendents at Calder Builders, delivering outpatient clinics, a surgical tower addition and two medical office buildings for health system clients. I want to bring that experience to the owner's side of the table.

My most useful work has happened before the first shovel. On the surgical tower, I pushed for a constructability review at design development that caught a conflict between the structural transfer beams and the medical gas risers. Resolving it on paper cost two weeks of redesign; resolving it in the field would have meant tearing out finished ceilings in an occupied hospital. I also rebuilt our monthly reporting so that every project showed cost-to-complete, contingency remaining and the three biggest schedule risks on a single page, which our clients started forwarding straight to their boards.

I know what a contractor's schedule recovery plan looks like when it is real and when it is not, because I have written both kinds and learned from the second. As your director, I would use that knowledge to hold contractors to their commitments while keeping the relationships that make the best builders want to bid your next project.

I hold the CCM and completed the DBIA core curriculum this spring, and I have spent the last two years mentoring our assistant project managers. I would welcome a conversation about your capital plan for the next five years and how your construction team should be built to deliver it.

Sincerely, Daniel Okafor