Connect with Charlie Carter:
Website: https://aisc.org/
Email: carter@aisc.org
Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today. Charlie Carter. Charlie, a structural engineer by education and for most of his career, is now the President of the American Institute of Steel Construction, the AISC.
The AISC is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit technical institute and trade association that serves the structural steel design community and construction industry in the United States. Charlie, welcome to the show.
Charlie Carter: Thanks, Lisa. I appreciate you having me.
Lisa Ryan: Please share with us a bit of your background. I know that you spent most of it as an engineer, so what led you to do what you're doing now?
Charlie Carter: Yes, well, I graduated with an engineering degree in structural engineering 30 years ago. It was a time where it was difficult to find a job. But there was this job at ASIC, which I knew from my education. I was taught steel design, and I took that job not knowing what it would be. But 30 years later, here I still am. I thought I was in my forever until retirement job. In my previous role, I was Vice President and chief structural engineer running all the technical activities of AISC on behalf of our industry members and serving the design Community traction industry.
But as fate sometimes has it, there's one other thing you might not have expected. So I became interested interviewed and was selected to be a is each President, my current role.
Lisa Ryan: The AISC is a credentialing organization, so please share with us what you do for the steel construction industry.
Charlie Carter: You mentioned in the introduction that we're a technical Institute and a trade association. Those are two very different functions. Usually, they are separate, but the AISC has existed for 100 years. So we're 100 years old this year.
Lisa Ryan: So, happy anniversary.
Charlie Carter: Thank you very much. It's been strange here to have an anniversary, but you can celebrate everything virtual. If you look at our founding, we were founded by some very smart people who saw a need to have things like the basis for design, the basis for contracting, and resources that would be useful. So in the 1920s, they created standards that engineers could follow in the design process and contracting standards, where you didn't have to invent the wheel every time you wanted to buy and sell structural steel. These are resources that people could refer to know what was acceptable and, more importantly, acceptable.
The AISC, in its technical institute function, has been serving that role of documents. The building code references every jurisdiction in the United States that uses the international building code design, and construction is done according to the standards we write. The key role that AISC provides as a technical Institute is creating that information and all the information that supports it. There are somewhere north of 300 volunteers - experts in design and construction - who give their time, expertise, and wisdom to create all that information. It's been maintained by the succession of those volunteers for 100 years.
In 100 years, somebody will say that it's been done for 200 years. There will always be buildings and bridges made out of steel and a need for information. The trade association part serves the industry that we exist in. They are the businesses that make the steel in a mill where it has a service Center where it's cut it to length, put holes in it, fittings on it, and prepare to ship to the field to be erected into buildings and bridges and those are steel fabricators.
Those...
