When people picture a career path, they usually picture a diploma first and a job second. Shawn McLean’s path ran the other direction, and it worked out fine.
Shawn is Lang Masonry’s Vice President of Operations. He has been with the company for 22 years. He did not start there. He started with a trowel he did not yet know how to hold, on a job site, as a laborer.
He didn’t set out to be a mason
Shawn went to school for auto body work and landed a job in it while he was still in high school. It did not take long for him to figure out the shop was not for him. The chemicals, the closed-in work, the day-to-day of it: none of it fit.
So he did what a lot of people in the trades do. He saw a listing for labor, showed up, and went to work. A friend put him in contact with someone at Lang Masonry, he showed up at the work site, and he was working the same day. No long application cycle, no waiting to hear back. He wanted the work, and the work was there.
That is worth sitting with for a second, especially if you are weighing a four-year degree against getting started now. Shawn was earning and learning on day one.
The climb was real, not a slogan
Plenty of companies talk about growth. Here is what growth actually looked like for Shawn, step by step:
- Laborer
- Equipment operator, for about two years
- Mason
- Superintendent
- Project manager
- General superintendent
- Vice President of Operations
Every one of those moves was earned on the job. Nobody handed it to him, and nobody capped how far he could go. As he puts it, he started as a laborer and he is now Vice President of Operations. He worked his way up.
What makes that possible
The thing that separates a job from a trade is whether anyone takes the time to teach you. At Lang Masonry, that is the deal on the table: if you want to learn to be a mason, someone will put a trowel in your hand and show you how to do it, then help you keep getting better as you go.
That matters because masonry is skilled work. It is not something you fake your way through, and it is not a fallback for people who could not do anything else. It is a craft with a clear progression, and the people who commit to it build a career the same way they build a wall: one deliberate course at a time.
It also speaks to a bigger problem. The skilled trades are short on people, and a lot of that shortage comes from a generation being told the only respectable path runs through a college campus. Shawn’s career is a straightforward argument against that. There was no limit on his growth, and there was no student debt attached to it either.
The takeaway
Shawn’s advice is not complicated. Show up every day, do your job to the best of your ability, and you will move up. Anything you want to progress to, you can.
That is not a motivational poster. It is a description of what happened to one guy who needed a job, took one, and stuck with it for 22 years.
If you are looking for a real career and a place that will actually teach you the trade, this is what that looks like.
Ready to start? Visit langmasonry.com.