Anyone in commercial construction? (company, hire, school, contractors)

[jco]

My husband's in school for construction management. He's a superintendent doing multi-million dollar TI's, but he's decided that he really wants to switch over to ground-ups or at least a mix of the two. How do you go from one to the other? It seems that ground-up contractors only hire people with experience in that field. He could get into a company here by knowing someone, but that would mean we would have to stay here a couple more years. Anyone else make the switch and how did you do it?