Women in Construction Week 2025: Taletha Skar
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A lot of jobs in construction are pretty visible: broken ground, dump trucks, concrete trucks, high visibility florescent yellow safety vests, and yes, even hard hats—hard hats of every color above ground. However, one of the most important pieces of infrastructure that keeps the entire City running and connected isn’t visible at all.
“There are a lot of things underground—you obviously have your storm sewers, your sanitary sewers, water pipes,” City of Madison Information Technology Fiber Manager Taletha Skar said. “We also have the conduit that has electrical for street lighting. We have electrical and wires for traffic signals. We have fiber. Yes, it’s cable wrapped up—but depending on the cable, there are a lot of itty-bitty little strands that we connect up, fuse together and run along our streets underground to keep the city powered and going.”
Skar works with contractors, but in a different way than most typical construction positions. She is the City’s first fiber manager, tasked with managing and maintaining the City’s fiber network.
“Fiber is our fiber optic network. It basically connects all the city facilities to the city network and that is how everything talks to the network and allows it to be online so we can — make changes to traffic signal timing from the office instead of sending technicians out to physically change things in the field,” Skar said. “It saves time and energy, but it also allows all of the city’s facilities – police, fire, and others to connect to the city’s network so you have phones, computers, cameras and it allows your day-to-day operations can run.”
Skar understands every layer of the fiber network and where it leads and weaves through the City’s underground, but she didn’t always know which route in the technology world she would choose. One good starting point: her parents at home in Rochester, Minn.
Skar’s mom was a computer drafter for IBM and her dad worked in computer science at the Mayo Clinic. However, when she started college at Winona University, she also experienced what would be her first challenge in the computer science world on her path to construction.
“I had an instructor who made the comment—because I was one of two women in computer science at that time—that computer science was not for women and it was for men, and it was not a place for me,” Skar said. “I had a different career path than computer science, but I was like, ‘but my mom can do the CAD drafting. I’m fine with it. Instead, I was like no I’m going to succeed in this. It’s a nice challenge sometimes to fit in, and say yeah, I should be taken seriously too.’”
Skar began getting serious about studying Geology, a perfect set up for her eventual career.
“Geology is study of earth and rocks. It also kind of ties in with fiber, because you have to watch for water tables as we’re installing, as we have flooding events, our vaults fill up in water, and if water gets into the conduits, we have to figure out where we’ve got to do work and improve infrastructure to prevent some of that happening,” Skar said.
Skar’s personal path led her to earn a position with the City of La Crosse as a part-time GIS Manager, and then eventually to the City of Madison in the Information Technology Department as a GIS Technician.
“Fiber was given to me to map and keep track of [at the City of Madison],” Skar said. “I thought, this is interesting.”
Skar’s interest and great work led to the creation of a new position she would eventually have as the City’s first Fiber Manager.
“We are at University Avenue and University Bay,” Skar said. “We’re standing on the corner next to our traffic signal cabinet and our fiber infrastructure that we have along University Avenue. It serves all the city’s sites and traffic signals – anything that we have here and west.”
Serving the City is a point of pride for Skar, and she hopes sharing her story can help other women understand some of the positions that aren’t as so obvious or above ground.
“I’ve met many women in construction, but a lot of the people who I work with on construction projects are all men,” Skar said. “To me, it’s [Women in Construction Week] just celebrating those of us who are stepping out of our comfort zone into more of a man’s world.”
A world all connected thanks to fiber.
“[Fiber] is everything,” Skar said. “It is the backbone of the city—without it, the city will not run. If fiber gets cut, we lose connectivity to our sites.”
No matter if you’re the only woman on site, or in the classroom, Skar has this advice: don’t let anyone stop you from doing what you want.
“You just gotta go for it,” Skar said. “You have to say, ‘I can succeed. I like this field, I want to do this work, and I don’t care what other people think. I will figure it out, and things will fall into place!’”
Fiber is a great example of visibility and relevance. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean its any less important. In fact, fiber could be arguably the most important part of infrastructure because just like each woman in construction sharing their story, fiber, within the many colors fused in a conduit tube underground, connects us, shares purpose and creates opportunities for all.
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