Through its Careers in Focus campaign, the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation shares meaningful career insight from Valley professionals. Below, Josh Carmichael shares his unique journey to becoming the Human Resources Director at K2 Electric, a Phoenix-based leading commercial electrical contracting company.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
A: I grew up on the Southeast side of Houston where I attended school in Deer Park, Texas. My dad was a craft recruiter in the construction industry and spent his entire career supporting the heavy-industrial market in the U.S. My mom worked in a building for the owner leasing out office space there. I am the middle child of three boys. After high school, I attended Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas where I obtained my bachelor’s degree and met my wife of now 20-years. I have three children – a 15-year-old daughter, a 13-year-old son, and a 9-year-old daughter. I moved from Texas to Arizona in 2019 when I was hired by a large general contractor in the Phoenix area and have been enjoying AZ since I got here.
Q: What attracted you to your career?
A: Admittedly, I fall into the bucket of never really knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up – even in college and a few years after graduating. As I mentioned previously, my dad worked in the Human Resources (HR) function in the construction industry his entire career so, after the birth of my first child, my wife decided to stay home with her which had me working two jobs to pay the bills. I was a General Manager of a fitness club where I worked from about 6 a.m. -6 p.m. Monday through Friday and then I worked at a movie theater three nights a week as a Booth Projectionist starting movies and cleaning projectors from about 7 p.m.- 1 a.m. I was definitely burning the midnight oil and so my dad offered to
give me more of a career-type job working in HR in the construction industry where I would only need one job due to the pay being a little more. My first job in the construction world was on a new build of a power plant in Franklin, Texas and I was truly blessed to gain that field experience and have amazing mentors while there. I started that job in 2007 so it’s been about a 15-year journey since then.
Q: What do you enjoy most about your role and why?
A: I enjoy connecting with the people who build the work so it’s always a joy to go out to a project and build relationships with those in roles like that. I enjoy the talent acquisition portion of HR as it is always fun to bring awesome people into a company where you work and see them add value to the mission you are trying to accomplish. I deeply enjoy developing people. I always tell people that if I wasn’t working in HR, I would be a coach. I love getting an idea of what a person’s career goals are and then helping them figure out how to get there.
Q: Can you describe your career path?
A: I spent the first five years of my HR construction career as an individual contributor. As mentioned previously, I started out in HR during the new construction build of a power plant as an HR Coordinator where I was fortunate enough to get exposure to several aspects of HR – recruiting, onboarding, training, drug & alcohol program management, and employee relations. From there, I internally transferred into an office professional recruiting role where I primarily recruited Project & Maintenance managers for large projects in the heavy industrial construction sector. I then took another internal transfer onto a government business project in Afghanistan for a year where I had some amazing mentors in the area of employee relations as my duties were primarily focused on employment investigations and conflict resolution. After leaving the desert of Afghanistan, I rolled back into the professional recruiting group before making one more internal transfer into an HR reporting and analytics role. That was all of my time as an individual contributor. Since then, I’ve worked for a few companies as either a senior HR leader or as Head of HR for larger construction companies where most of my time has been spent attempting to maintain/optimize the culture of those companies, figuring out how to best develop the workforce, and a lot of time recruiting some awesome people to work with. Currently, I’m leading the HR function at K2 Electric based in Phoenix and helping them achieve their mission and vision statements.
Q: What advice do you have for people who may be interested in a similar career?
A: Integrity is paramount for any role, but especially while working in HR. You have to love people – that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be an extrovert, but you really need to care about people. You need to be precise/detail-focused, but you also need to be flexible too as the HR world has a lot of gray areas to work through with leadership teams. You need to have conviction and be willing to stand up for what is right, but that needs to be combined with the correct temperament and business acumen to have an influence on those you may need to challenge from time to time. You need to be okay with emotional conflict – not because you are regularly stirring things up, but because there are many times there will be difficult things an HR professional has to work through that can make working relationships strain for a time. Lastly, you have to really care about customer service.
Q: Why is it important that the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation continue to prepare Arizonans to successfully enter our workforce?
A: I love the (Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation’s construction workforce collaborative) Build Your Future Arizona because of its focus on the construction industry and there is a lot of work in the construction industry, but not nearly enough people leaving high school for the construction industry. I think it’s important to help get more people into the industry to meet the demand for construction workers, but it also can be very helpful to so many people who may be a great fit to enter the construction industry in understanding the amazing career one can have as well as the varied career paths they can take along the way of their journey.