Joshua Young’s giving personality fits his job. As Lead Structural Engineer in Industrial Design in Haskell’s St. Louis, Missouri, office, it’s his discipline’s responsibility to support entire structures and other disciplines’ scope. He’s equally supportive as he collaborates with colleagues and clients.
“Structural engineering is the skeleton of everything that makes stuff stay up,” Young said. “It’s the only discipline that doesn’t have any purpose on its own. Everyone needs us.”
Young’s efforts to work with all around him earned him Haskell’s Living Values Award, which recognizes a team member who “consistently displays Haskell’s corporate values of Team, Excellence, Service and Trust with commitment and passion.”
In nominating Young for the honor, Senior Structural Designer Thomas Tie wrote, “Joshua puts constant effort into making sure those on his team not only have what they need to get their job done but also be successful. He strives for excellence in everything that he does, going above and beyond to make sure tasks are completed on time and with the highest level of quality. Although his plate is always full, he maintains a positive attitude and continues to ask if there is anything else he can do for others. He has excellent communication skills and demonstrates a high degree of knowledge and professionalism in everything he does.
“Joshua accepts responsibility for decisions and actions, always looking for a positive outcome. He is reliable and continually makes himself available to those who need help or have questions. He never lets anything slow him down, no matter what life throws at him. He continually celebrates the successes of others and opens his home to gatherings with friends and colleagues. He is a true team player.”
Young figures he learned his sharing spirit from participating in youth sports, most notably soccer, as he was growing up in Arkansas. That passion continues today via his son’s youth soccer participation, which included a Chicago tournament over Labor Day weekend. Young spent three weeks alongside a college friend at the 2014 Brazil World Cup, absorbing the world’s fascination with soccer and learning about many cultures. The photo chosen to accompany the Living Values Award plaque shows Young in a royal blue soccer jersey with a backpack, taken during his South American soccer adventure.
“I played a lot of sports growing up, and I guess I was one of the better players,” he said. “I always found during competition that I liked to find the holes that exist and discover a way to make things better. Usually, there are quite a few layers of low-hanging fruit that you can solve right away, and it’s the same way with my current occupation.”
Young said he comes from a family heritage of contractors with an interest in archaeology and construction. “It just fit at an early age,” Young said. “Engineering just seemed to make sense.”
As a teenager, he worked as a “gofer” at his father’s flooring business. He earned undergraduate degrees in Architectural and Civil Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology and his master’s in Structural Engineering from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville.
Young remembers his first big project with Haskell when he was given one of the lead roles in designing and coordinating a Connecticut renewable power plant. The combination of his engineering expertise and competitive spirit came together.
“It was a fairly big project, and I was thrown into the deep end for some of the responsibilities at that site,” Young said. “It was challenging and probably the most memorable, for sure, for me because I was able to get through that.”
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