Keller Group, the London-listed geotechnical specialist, reported interim results for the six months to 30 June showing revenue up 11.1% to £1,608m and underlying operating profit up 17.1% to £117.9m on a constant currency basis. The group's order book hit a record £1.9bn, up from £1.6bn a year earlier, and the interim dividend was raised 57%.

The growth has been led by North America, where revenue rose 16.7% and operating profit 17.7%, driven by data centre foundation work and a multi-year highway remediation contract on the I-40. North America now accounts for around 60% of group revenue. But Keller is a UK-headquartered business with a substantial domestic ground engineering arm, and a record global order book of this size does not stay contained to one region for long: it tends to pull UK divisions along with it, both through direct group investment and through the confidence it gives regional management to hire ahead of demand.

Why it matters for the market

Ground engineering sits underneath almost everything else in construction. Before a hospital, a data centre, a stretch of railway or a housing scheme can go vertical, someone has to deal with piling, ground improvement, retaining structures and foundations. It is a specialist discipline, and it is chronically short of experienced engineers relative to demand, because the skill set (geotechnical design, piling supervision, ground investigation interpretation) takes years to build and does not transfer cleanly from general civils.

Keller's results matter as a leading indicator precisely because ground engineering work happens early in a project's life. A record order book now points to a wave of enabling and substructure work moving through the pipeline over the next 12 to 18 months, well before those schemes are visible as cranes on a skyline. Data centres, in particular, have become one of the most active sources of specialist foundation work in the UK as well as the US, given the scale and load-bearing demands of hyperscale facilities.

What it means for your career

If you are a geotechnical engineer, piling engineer or ground engineering-focused site manager, this is a market where experience is scarce enough that moving employer tends to come with a real premium, not just a marginal uplift. Candidates with data centre foundation experience specifically are in short supply in the UK, because so few schemes of that scale have been built here to date; anyone who has worked a hyperscale or large industrial foundation package should expect recruiters and main contractors to be unusually persistent.

For quantity surveyors and commercial managers, ground engineering subcontract packages are notoriously difficult to cost and administer well, given the ground risk and the frequency of variations once a site is opened up. Commercial staff who understand geotechnical subcontracts, and can hold their own in early warning and compensation event conversations with a specialist ground engineering contractor, are valuable to main contractors managing that risk on hospital, rail and energy schemes.

More broadly, if your CV shows any ground engineering exposure from earlier in your career and you have since moved into general commercial or project management roles, it is worth flagging that background explicitly. Main contractors bidding into the schemes this order book will eventually feed are actively looking for people who can speak the language of both worlds.