The fastest route to promotion is a problem nobody assigned you
Ask most QSs what gets someone promoted and they'll describe doing their own job brilliantly. That's rarely the reason someone gets the tap on the shoulder.
Opinion · page 2
Opinions with skin in the game.
Careers, hiring, leadership and the habits that get people promoted, including the ones nobody spells out for you, and the positions I will defend.
The talent shortage has already arrived. The numbers are starker than most boards realise.
The talent shortage is not on its way, it has already arrived. If you are hiring at any level of seniority, or weighing up your own options, the data is worth ten minutes.
Keep a decision log. It's the most underrated habit for getting promoted.
Nobody is in the room when you make the good calls. If you don't write them down, the story of your year defaults to whoever is easiest to remember, and that's rarely you.
Staying five years too long is the real red flag on your CV
Hiring panels worry about job hoppers, but the CVs that actually trouble me show someone who stopped growing years before they left. Here is how to spot it in yourself before someone else does.
If nobody's annoyed with you six months into the director role, you didn't do it
The moment a QS becomes a commercial director, the job changes from being good at the work to making other people good at it, and that first step trips up more people than anything else in the Pathway.
Mentors won't get you promoted. Sponsors will.
A mentor tells you what to do. A sponsor tells other people you're already doing it. Most QSs invest in the wrong one.
Promoted above your mates? The kindest thing you can do is stop pretending
The hardest promotion in construction is the first one that puts you in charge of the people you sat beside. Softening it helps nobody.
A counter-offer is the cheapest way to keep you, not the best reason to stay
When your resignation lands, money appears fast. The thing that made you look in the first place almost never moves at the same speed.
The housing numbers are turning into hiring
A contract worth more than 112 million for affordable housing, signed this month, tells you more about the next hiring cycle than any jobs report.
No Dead Ends - What BAM taught me
There is a number worth sitting with before anything else is said. One million. That is roughly how many young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training. Not on a gap year. No
The best people in UK construction are rarely looking
They are heads down delivering a major programme, trusted by their board, and not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night.
Money devolves overnight. Leadership capability does not.
A contact, John, asked me today what I made of Andy Burnham's speech. I did not sit in the room at the People's History Museum. I listened to it. But I spend my working life placing the people who act
Two-Speed Market
There are two UK construction industries right now. They use the same trade press, the same industry bodies, and the same pool of professionals. They look, on the surface, like one sector. But they ar
Skills Shortage Leadership Problem
Every time the construction industry publishes another report on the skills crisis, the framing is the same. Too few young people entering the trades. Too many experienced workers retiring. Not enough
Twelve Years on Site Teaches You
I spent the first twelve years of my working life as a Quantity Surveyor. Not in a back office, not on a desk somewhere far from the work. On live construction sites, on real programmes, for a major tier