Ernestas Stonys in the magazine “What to be 2026” tells about her career path since she had to decide on a direction and take the first step. It all started with a bold call for work.

“I was a green young man: I called the director directly and asked for a job,” Ernestas Stonys, project director of Tilsta, laughs at his courage today.
Ernestas, who is responsible for the largest transport infrastructure projects in Lithuania today, started his career as a simple auxiliary worker.

He was attracted to the field of road engineering by large, powerful machinery, scale of work and interesting challenges. Older friends also encouraged me to choose such a profession, who told us about interesting road workers’ sciences and practices.

Once, while already studying, the lecturer took E. Stonis and his classmates to see the construction of the King Mindaugas Bridge in Vilnius, which was built by Tilsta. “I saw how the bridge was born, and I was just hooked. I decided that I wanted to work for the company that built it.”

This is how Ernestas ended up in Tilsta, where he tried every possible link for almost two decades: he worked as a worker, foreman, foreman, work manager, project manager, and now holds the responsible position of project director.

E. Stonys’ colleagues joke that there is no need to climb the career ladder here: climbing the career ladder is like an escalator, and Ernest is a great example of this. How did he manage to do that? “If you want to and improve, then you grow, and your responsibilities change at the same time,” the project director of Tilsta usually answers.

He remembers his career path when he was still working as a road worker: this job is not easy, because in winter it is cold, and in summer you bake in the sun. While working his first jobs, E. Stonys did not yet know how high he would be able to climb the “escalator” of his career.

“When you are a worker, you give a task and do what you instruct. When you are a brigadier, you are assigned a brigade of several people, for which you are responsible. When you work as a foreman, you are responsible for a large brigade, you organize the work. To make it easier to imagine, the bridge is built by 15 to 60 workers, divided into brigades. The next step is the work manager, who is responsible for the entire object, ordering materials, planning. And the project manager is already the master of the whole project,” E. Stonys explains the nuances of the tried and tested duties.

The specialist says that he remembers the reconstruction of the longest car bridge in Lithuania – the Jurbarkas Bridge, as well as the Lentvaris crossing project, where a new tunnel had to be installed without interrupting train traffic. Now the team works at the Kruonis Hydro Storage Power Plant – it is one of the most technologically complex objects in the country.

“When you see those buildings that you have contributed to while driving through Lithuania, it’s a lot of fun,” says the project director of Tilsta.