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.
Careers, hiring, leadership and the habits that get people promoted, including the ones nobody spells out for you.
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.
Burnham wants technical training on an equal footing with academic study from age 14. The question is not whether that is a good idea, it is whether construction is ready to take advantage of it.
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 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
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
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
Answers to the questions hiring organisations and senior professionals most often ask about executive search in UK construction and infrastructure.
Why retaining older workers, and passing on what they know, has become one of the most pressing questions in UK construction and infrastructure.
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.
Every major UK construction programme eventually reaches a quiet period. The political environment shifts. The funding pipeline pauses. The procurement approach gets rethought. The scope is redrawn. W
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 particular kind of unease that comes with running your own business. It is not the fear of failure. It is the fear of not knowing what you don't know.
Every senior leader in UK construction eventually faces the same question. A critical role opens up. You have someone internal who is close to ready. Do you promote them, or do you run an external sea
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
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
The single biggest predictor of whether a senior search will succeed has nothing to do with the recruiter you pick. It has nothing to do with the salary you offer. It has nothing to do with the state
Every year, I have conversations with senior professionals working for Tier One contractors who are considering a move to the client side. Sometimes it is a major infrastructure client. Sometimes a de
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
One of the most expensive mistakes a senior professional can make in UK construction is joining a programme that turns out to be nothing like what was described at interview. It happens more often tha
If you are hiring for a senior commercial or operational role in UK construction and you are relying on job boards to find candidates, you are fishing in a pond where the fish you want have never swum
You have just been offered a new role. Senior position, better package, a programme you are genuinely excited about. You hand in your resignation. Your current employer sits you down and makes you an
If you are a senior professional in UK construction and you believe your CV is what gets you your next role, I need to break some news. It is not.
Nobody in construction underestimates the cost of a failed project. We have all seen the post-mortems. The change orders. The disputes. The programmes that slipped by a year and burned through margin.
There is a pattern I have been tracking for the last 18 months that most of the industry is not openly discussing. Senior commercial and operational professionals are leaving tier-one UK contractors i
Most senior people know they should have moved a year before they finally do. These are the signals worth acting on rather than explaining away.