Women in Construction Week Spotlight: Katie Brittain, CCO-Certified Construction Safety Leader at M.C. Dean
Women in Construction Week is a time to recognize the skill, leadership, and impact women bring to jobsites across the country, especially in disciplines where precision and careful decision making directly influence safety. For Katie Brittain, Construction Safety Manager at M.C. Dean, that connection is exactly what drew her into the field and continues to motivate her every day.
“Helping people and keeping them safe has always been a core driver for me,” said Brittain. Early in her career, she was introduced to the complexity of overhead lifting and quickly realized how much rides on the details. She immersed herself not only in the rules, but in the physics behind lift planning: where the center of gravity sits, how loads behave through movement, and how rigging selections influence control and stability. That curiosity first turned into a specialty, then into industry-recognized credentials.
Today, Katie is Rigger, Signalperson, and Telehandler Operator certified – all CCO Certifications designed to independently assess the knowledge and practical skills required to perform critical lifting-related tasks safely.
Katie describes earning her CCO Certifications as both validating and empowering, proof that she could do more than understand concepts on paper. It strengthened her ability to support operators and riggers in the field with plans, training, and real-time decision making. She’s seen certification credibility directly translate into better collaboration: “It’s a force multiplier,” she explains, especially when addressing “this is how we always do it” moments and steering teams back to best practices with clear, technical reasoning.
That technical fluency matters because CCO Certification programs are built around measurable competence, combining written testing with hands-on practical exams.
What Katie enjoys most is “the intersection of precision and people.” She loves seeing a challenging lift executed exactly as planned. And just as much, she loves coaching crews on the “why” behind safe, efficient rigging choices.
Her advice to women entering the industry is straightforward: expect hard things, prepare relentlessly, and “take up space.” With commitment, training, and credentials that speak for themselves, women like Katie are making the lifting industry stronger, safer, and more innovative.
