From nursery rhymes to running wire: one mother’s path into the trades How a stay-at-home mother transitioned into construction through the Walsh x UK Pre-Apprentice program
Carol Savchick was handed a degree in Fine Art painting when she walked across the Eastern Kentucky University graduation stage a decade ago. She spent the next years of her life singing nursery rhymes, perfecting new recipes and managing her family calendar. In pockets of free time, she would hover over a canvas with a paintbrush and acrylic paint to pull together pieces she would later try to commission.
This was until she realized she was ready to work outside the home.
Now, most mornings, Savchick is up before her three children stir. She drives an hour from her home in eastern Kentucky, arrives at a bustling University of Kentucky construction site off Nicholasville Road, by 7 a.m., and spends her days laying electrical conduit inside what will become UK’s new Cancer and Advanced Ambulatory Building.
“I basically help create metal rivers for electrical cables to run through, all to power a cancer center,” she said. “It’s very cool, and very empowering.”
Savchick, 33, is part of the second cohort of the Walsh Construction, University of Kentucky Pre-Apprenticeship Program, a workforce development initiative that places participants with local contractors working on UK’s Cancer and Advanced Ambulatory Building while offering them a broad introduction to the trades. Savchick works with BESCO, an electrical contractor working on the UK project. She is one of a small number of women on a job site that, on any given day, is predominately male.
For years, the plan was to stay home. Savchick married in 2012 and stepped away from the workforce to raise her children, now 9, 6, and 18 months. She tried to sustain a life as a working artist on the side, selling commissions and developing her craft in the hours she could find between school pickups and nap times.
“I tried to give 100% attention to my kids and 100% attention to myself as a working artist,” she said, “which is obviously not sustainable.”
When she eventually decided to return to work, she moved through a series of restarts. There was a customer service role at a healthcare company. A sales position at a tech firm. A coding bootcamp that felt promising until artificial intelligence arrived on the scene and created a sentiment of job insecurity in the field.
“It would require so much more of my energy to build a sustainable career in tech. It would take too much time from my family,” she said of the programming path. “Whereas construction offers me that structured 9 to 5 where I come home and when I’m home, I’m actually home.”
Savchick’s pivot to the trades began one day as she was scrolling on Facebook. A man named George Marshall, affiliated with the IBEW Local 369 chapter, posted in a community group about opportunities in the union. Savchick sent him a cold message. He connected her with Jeff Draper at BESCO. One phone call led to another. She sent her resume. She followed up.
“It took some initiative,” she said with a laugh.
There is a detail Savchick offers almost as an aside, but it carries the weight of the whole story.
“This might sound goofy,” she said, “but I’m a woman, and growing up I was expected to get married and raise my kids and be home with them. And I kind of held myself back in that regard. I was afraid to do anything more. I finally hit a point in my 30s where I needed to be more capable and confident and know that I could support myself and my kids on my own.”
She paused. “And construction offered that for me.”
Her household has since reorganized around her new career. She is now the primary earner. Her husband stays home with the children. It is, she acknowledges, an arrangement that would be harder without a partner willing to hold down the home front.
“If you run a household well, you’ll fit in on a job site well. Once you get your bearings, you can anticipate what needs to get done,” Savchick says.
That parallel is not lost on her. Savchick draws a direct line between the project management skills she honed across eight years of running a household — the logistics, the deadlines, the coordination of competing needs — and what she does now on a construction site.
“Construction is a lot like running a household,” she said, “only on a much, much larger scale.”
On the job site, Savchick is one of ten women among hundreds of workers. She has found the adjustment, ultimately, to be minor. The people are down to earth, she says. Competent. She loves the environment.
What has struck her most is something harder to name, the satisfaction of finishing something. Of seeing results. Of knowing that the pipe she laid on Level 5 of the cancer center is still there, and she’ll lay more on Level 6, and then Level 7.
“My worth is measured on how well I do a job,” she said. “Whenever I do a good job and it’s recognized, that feels really good. And it’s not easy to get recognized for a good job in other industries.”
She is not, she is quick to say, someone for whom the work feels like a sacrifice. She built shelves in her kids’ rooms. She has become confident with power tools at home. Her six-year-old daughter has started hanging around when she works on projects, wanting to get involved.
“I am pumped to funnel my kids into the trades,” Savchick said. “I don’t want her to feel like she has one direction. I want her to feel like anything is possible.”
She believes there is an untapped pipeline of people — parents who have spent years managing households, navigating competing demands, keeping a family’s logistics from unraveling — who are precisely the kind of workers the construction industry needs and isn’t reaching.
“I didn’t realize that project management meant construction,” she said. “For a whole year I was in sales and I was like, what is project management? I figured it was like corporate sales. But it’s very much infrastructure related.”
The program ends June 9. Savchick is already checking the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers website daily. She wants to enter the full registered apprenticeship. She wants to become a journeyman. After that, she is eyeing data centers, networking infrastructure, the expanding electrical demands of a digital world that, she notes with some satisfaction, still requires human hands to wire.
Asked what she would say to another mother sitting on the edge of this kind of leap — curious, scared, not sure she belongs — Savchick did not hesitate.
“Girl, you can do this,” she said. “Just shush those scared voices. Stay humble, observe your environment, and learn from the guys who know their craft. You got this. If you can handle watching a bunch of kids, you can definitely handle construction.”
She laughed. Then she added, more quietly: “It’ll be weird for the first three weeks. But you’ll be fine.”
Her fine art background, she has come to believe, was never a detour. The patience required to capture light on canvas, spending hours on a single inch of surface, is the same patience required to run conduit correctly through a building that will outlast everyone who built it. Craftsmanship, she says, is craftsmanship.
And her craftsmanship is at work, in a building off Nicholasville Road, in a room she has not yet seen finished, in the electrical cable powering a place where people will go to heal.