Before anything gets built, somebody has to put a peg in the ground.

Setting out is the least glamorous job on site. It's a level, a tape, a set of drawings and a lot of patience. Nobody photographs it for the brochure.

But anyone who has spent time on site knows what happens when it's wrong. A setting-out error of a few millimetres at the start doesn't stay a few millimetres. It carries through every course of brickwork, every column line and every fit-out package that follows. By the time anyone notices, it has become very expensive.

Then, once the job is moving, a different discipline takes over: the critical path. That's the chain of activities where any delay holds up everything that follows. Senior people on a job spend their days protecting it.

I've been thinking about those two ideas a lot this week. A career in this industry works the same way.

The first ten years compound

I trained as a Quantity Surveyor and spent my early career on site with tier-one contractors. For the last twenty-odd years in executive search, I've asked almost every director I place the same question: how did you get here?

The answers have a pattern. The habits that made them were formed early. Somebody showed them how to read a contract properly, how to stand their ground in a valuation meeting, or how to tell a client something they didn't want to hear. Those lessons were set out in the first ten years and compounded for the next thirty.

The opposite is true too. Small errors made early also compound: a bad first manager, a habit nobody corrected, a belief that keeping your head down is the same thing as progressing. By the time those people sit in front of me for a director role, the problem is rarely their technical ability. It's something that went in slightly out of line fifteen years earlier and was never re-set.

What does someone in those first ten years actually need? It's rarely more content. They need three things:

  • The honest version of how this industry works, including the parts nobody spells out for you.
  • A mentor a few rungs ahead, not thirty. The person who was in your seat five years ago remembers what it felt like. A chief executive usually doesn't.
  • Something serious to finish. A structure, an end point, and proof in your own name that you completed it.

The last ten years are a critical path problem

At the other end of a career, the needs are almost the reverse.

If you're running a project, a region or a business, nobody has to explain how construction works to you. What you need is the part of the job nobody wrote down. That means knowing who is moving, who is hiring, and what the next seat will ask of you. In my line of work, that's read from inside the interview room long before it appears in a press release.

There's also a harder question that senior people rarely say out loud: what happens to everything you know when you leave?

That's where the critical path comes back in. A senior leader who doesn't develop the people behind them becomes the delay everyone downstream is waiting on. The knowledge is real and hard-won, and it walks out of the industry the day they retire. We talk constantly about the skills shortage at the entry level. We talk much less about the experience walking out at the top.

One front door was speaking to nobody

All of this came to a head this week, because I made a decision about the Lechley Community.

Until now it had one front door. That page tried to speak to a sixth-former and a group commercial director at the same time, with the same headline and the same button. The people who signed up proved the problem: a sixth-form student, a bricklayer and a graduate, alongside a CEO, a project director and a tier-one director. They all came through the same door, but they weren't looking for the same thing.

A page that speaks to everyone speaks to no one in particular.

So, from this week, there are two doors:

Setting Out is for your first ten years. You start with the Early Careers Pathway, then move into your own discipline. You get a mentor a few rungs ahead, matched personally, and the honest version of how this industry works. Every pathway ends in a certificate in your name.

Critical Path is for the people running the job. It covers who is moving and who is hiring at the senior end, and the pathways to director level. It also has the Mentoring Pathway and a place to hand down what you know before it leaves the industry with you.

Both doors are free. There's no advertising and no catch, and both lead into the same community.

Why one community, and not two

That last point matters most to me.

I could have built two separate things. But the two groups need each other. The person setting out needs someone who has already made the climb. The person on the critical path needs somewhere to put what they know before it's lost.

Mentoring is the bridge between those two doors. Get the setting out right for someone in their first years, and you've built the next generation of people who protect the critical path.

That's the reason for the two doors.

If you're in your first ten years: community.lechley.com/setting-out

If you're running the job: community.lechley.com/critical-path

I'd like to hear from people at both ends. If you're in your first ten years, what do you wish somebody had told you in year one? If you're further on, what do you know now that you'd hate to see leave the industry with you?