Home › Work activities › Operate heavy-duty construction or installation equipment
O*NET detailed work activityOperate heavy-duty construction or installation equipment
Stays humanHands-on work
7 jobs16 tasks
This is physical, in-person work with real objects, tools, equipment and places that change from day to day. AI can't do it for you.
Part of Operate construction or excavation equipment, under the O*NET work activity group Controlling Machines and Processes. Individual tasks below can carry a different label when their own wording calls for it (0 AI-ready, 0 AI-assist, 16 stays human).
Tasks built on this activity
- Drive pilings to provide support for buildings or other structures, using heavy equipment with a pile driver head.
- Move levers and turn valves to activate power hammers, or to raise and lower drophammers that drive piles to required depths.
- Operate track wrenches to tighten or loosen bolts at joints that hold ends of rails together.
- Adjust handwheels and depress pedals to control attachments, such as blades, buckets, scrapers, or swing booms.
- Engage mechanisms that lay tracks or rails to specified gauges.
- Operate heavy equipment, such as bulldozers and front-end loaders.
- Operate single- or multiple-head spike driving machines to drive spikes into ties and secure rails.
- Drive vehicles that automatically move and lay tracks or rails over sections of track to be constructed, repaired, or maintained.
- Operate single- or multiple-head spike pullers to pull old spikes from ties.
- Push controls to close grasping devices on track or rail sections so that they can be raised or moved.
- Adjust controls of machines that spread, shape, raise, level, or align track, according to specifications.
- Turn wheels of machines, using lever controls, to adjust guidelines for track alignments or grades, following specifications.
- String and attach wire-guidelines machine to rails so that tracks or rails can be aligned or leveled.
- Operate heavy equipment, such as backhoes.