Careers, hiring, leadership and the habits that get people promoted, including the ones nobody spells out for you.
Andy Burnham has backed a land value tax since 2010. He is now the likely next Prime Minister. Our industry has spent sixteen years treating this as somebody else's argument. That is no longer a safe
The UK water sector has quietly replaced a remarkable share of its most senior leadership in the space of a year. Five water companies have appointed new chief executives in roughly twelve months: Sev
Andy Burnham is back in Parliament. Whether or not he reaches Number 10, the shift his rise represents has real consequences for how, where and what we build.
Two Prime Ministers in a row have kept a former one advising on the G20. Construction retires its best commercial brains at 60 and never rings them again.
Everyone tells you to make yourself indispensable. It is exactly backwards, and it is why so many good QSs plateau at the level where they became essential.
Panels believe they are weighing the whole interview. Most have already decided, and spend the rest of the hour confirming it.
The moment you have authority over someone's pay or their next role, the account you get from them changes. Building a route for the truth to reach you is a director's job, not a personality trait.
The QSs who get the tap on the shoulder are rarely the ones who launch the most initiatives. They're the ones who chase the retention nobody else will chase, and actually close it out.
The CV rules senior candidates out well and rules them in badly. Three calls in one week showed why executive search should be built on evidence, not employers.
The skill that got you promoted, giving fast right answers, is the same skill that keeps your team dependent on you. Here's what to do instead.
Boards run immaculate six-month searches and then abandon the hire on day one. Senior placements rarely fail on capability. They fail on the landing, and almost nobody resources it.
Reference checks at senior level have become a ritual that confirms decisions instead of testing them. Here is how to take one properly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A mentor tells you what to do. A sponsor tells other people you're already doing it. Most QSs invest in the wrong one.
The hardest promotion in construction is the first one that puts you in charge of the people you sat beside. Softening it helps nobody.
When your resignation lands, money appears fast. The thing that made you look in the first place almost never moves at the same speed.
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.
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
They are heads down delivering a major programme, trusted by their board, and not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night.
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
Answers to the questions hiring organisations and senior professionals most often ask about executive search in UK construction and infrastructure.
Most construction businesses use recruitment agencies the same way for every role, from a site engineer to a managing director. For senior and board appointments, that is usually a mistake. The two co
Why retaining older workers, and passing on what they know, has become one of the most pressing questions in UK construction and infrastructure.
Most weeks on the phone tell you something about the market. This week told me the same thing four times, from four different sectors.
Alan Milburn called them an anxious generation this week. Not a soft one. Not snowflakes. Anxious. And the difference between those two words is the whole argument.
There is a conversation I have at least twice a month. A senior construction leader tells me they have a critical role to fill. Commercial Director. Project Director. Operations Director. Something th
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
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
I spent the first ten 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