An excerpt from Chapter 6: DIFFERENT CONSTRUCTION ROLES: PART ONE
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HANDS OR HEAD
Say you’re drawn to a career in the construction industry. Good for you; we need people. There are so many opportunities there, and the variety of those opportunities is amazing.
The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to work with your hands or with your head. I’ll qualify that a little. Craft workers are extremely intelligent, and they use their heads as well as their hands, but as I wish to talk in general terms here, please forgive me for adopting a general rule of thumb.
It seems to me that anyone about to join the construction industry is immediately faced with a fork in the road. Do they want to work with their hands – on the tools as it were, doing the physical grafting – or do they want to work on the management and/or administrative side? That’s the basic choice facing each and every one of our new candidates right there.
We’ll talk about the ways to go about achieving both in due course, but I just wanted to talk a little about the basic differences between these two potential avenues.
Some people see a respectable, fulfilling, and sustainable career in the skilled work areas of construction. They train to be carpenters, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, brickies, and the like.
Maybe every day is different, working on a variety of construction projects, and every day is demanding in its own way. These craftspeople work up a sweat all day long, and at the end of their shift, they are able to see the results of their endeavours. They can then go home, put their feet up, have their dinner (or tea), watch a bit of telly, and spend time with their families. Then they go to sleep and wake up and do it all over again the next day.
They are craftsmen and women. They work with their hands. This is an option for you as you consider your career in construction.
These skilled men and women are also supported by a host of journeymen: labourers, hod carriers, odd-jobbers, and those that don’t have the necessary paperwork or apprenticeships to class themselves as ‘skilled’ (but nevertheless support and do the fetching and carrying for those who ply their hard-earned trade).
This is the physical stuff. This is what most people think of as actual ‘construction’.
Then there’s another side. Maybe one that a lot of people don’t realise exists, or certainly don’t realise its importance to the building industry. This is the management, supervisory, and administrative side.
A colleague once said to me, the guys onsite don’t have ‘our mentality’. What he meant was the onsite team didn’t understand the behind-the-scenes pressure to ensure a successful and profitable outcome to a project. As long as these workers ended up with a decent day’s pay for a day’s work, their world was in equilibrium.
I had a job once where we employed a team of subcontractors to do some roofing work on a factory unit on a large industrial estate. The company I worked for was small, probably turning over about £2m a year, max. They had no contracts manager on board (i.e., no one overseeing the work being done on our behalf).
The gang of subbies, therefore, had no supervision. There was no one to ensure that they jumped out of the van at eight in the morning, put in a decent shift, did the job right, and then clocked off at four in the afternoon.
What did this unsupervised lot do?
They turned up to site about 9.00. And just sat in the van. Got out of the van around 10.00 and got on the roof. Messed around until 11.45 or so, then got back in the van and had lunch until about 1.15. Then they did another hour and a half of so-called graft before heading home about three.
It was the best job they’d ever had.
The site manager of the entire industrial estate rocked up one day. He could smell cannabis in the air, and saw no work being done. There had been almost nil progression since his previous visit to the project a month earlier.
Our company got kicked off the job. Our client, who basically had the entire maintenance contract for the whole industrial estate, was similarly banished.
My boss decided to let the subbie gang go. It was a few weeks before Christmas.
Their main man complained. ‘I’ve got presents to buy for the kids. How am I going to tell my missus I’ve been let go just before Christmas?’
Well, you reap what you sow. I don’t wish to be heartless, but they should have had a go when they had the chance.
And the failure of that project buggered up so many professional relationships and the loss of several very profitable contracts. They don’t have our mentality, as my colleague said.
This story illustrates why we have competitive tenders. That’s why people get given a fixed price to deliver a certain scope of works. An open chequebook generally does no one any favours.
As for management, many people who have worked ‘on the tools’ end up overseeing the work that they formerly did themselves. I’ve heard it a hundred times – ‘I used to work on the tools’. It makes sense.
Certain (perhaps all) manual work comes at an eventual cost to one’s physical condition. Laying bricks is hard and carrying lengths of steel and timber is hard. Plastering walls, and probably every physical task you can think of becomes that much tougher as you get older.
Plumbers and electricians have to dig into floor joists and walls to lay their pipes and cables. They’re up and down, 100 times a day. That’s no good for the knees.
If you qualified in your trade in your early twenties, then a quarter of a century later – by the time you’re in your mid-forties – you’re probably feeling the pain in your joints.
Contract management, or maybe becoming a working supervisor, is therefore a logical option. You can use your expertise, and although there’s a lot more paperwork, and a bit more responsibility, at least you live to fight another day.
Some of us go down the pen-pusher route right from the very start, of course. Which often prompts those onsite operatives to declare that you’ve never done a proper day’s work in your life! (I started out as a labourer, so I’ve got my retort to that last accusation well prepared.)
There are many opportunities for professional and administrative staff in construction.
We need buyers, planners, designers, estimators, and clerical staff behind the scenes. We need management personnel to oversee quality, health and safety, and to protect and maximise the project finances once these schemes go live onsite.
Thinking of the construction industry as a potential career?
Ask yourself first, are you better working with your hands or with your head?
Whatever answer you come up with, the industry wants and needs you all.
TRAINING AND QUALIFICATIONS
So, you’ve decided the construction industry is for you. You’ve met that fork in the road and chosen between head and hands. So, how do you get from there to where you really want to be? Well, training and qualifications.
In the olden days, that would have been a straightforward apprenticeship. Basically, you would work under the tutelage of an experienced old hand, with some monitoring and guidance, periodic examination, and you would spend about four years learning your chosen craft. You would still learn and improve thereafter, of course, but you’d be qualified, you’d be earning a proper wage, and you’d be let loose to ply your trade in the construction world on behalf of your clients.
But apprenticeships, in the real trades, are not as common as they once were. Nowadays, it all seems to point in the direction of college courses. NVQs, BTECs, or something called the T-Level, which came online in 2020. They all offer practical qualifications.
Through a combination of classroom theory and practical experience, you can earn an industry and employer-recognised qualification that will give you the right to call yourself a qualified tradesperson.
I know a bloke who is a signwriter. He left school at age 15 and got a job as an apprentice. First task, make a sign for the men’s loo. First attempt, woefully dismissed.
‘If you can’t get the height, the spacing, the detailing just right, you better fuck off now,’ his mentor told him in no uncertain terms.
Would anyone dare say that now? Actually, in the often-robust world of construction, they probably still would!
The apprentice signwriter’s working day would always begin with him making a cup of tea for both his mentor and himself. One day, in a moment of mischief, he took his boss’s favourite mug, screwed it firmly into the workbench, and then filled it to the top with the older gent’s daily brew.
‘Cuppa there,’ he said casually when his boss strolled into work.
He then watched as the man struggled to lift said cup off the table on which it sat. The penny eventually dropped, and you can imagine the cursing that followed!
Anyway, after five years of learning, doing, and doing again, the apprentice became a craftsman. He could actually remember the day that he ‘graduated’. They used to have a lorry turn up once a week with all of the materials that they needed to make their signs. It was the job of all of the young lads to unload the lorry, doing the heavy lifting of the metal sheets, pieces of timber, and tins of paint.
One day, the lorry arrived, and the foreman of the factory asked the apprentice to join them in unloading the goods. He was about to do so – a task he’d performed every week since joining the firm – when his mentor told the foreman that he couldn’t have him.
Asked why, he said it was because the lad was no longer an apprentice. He was a signwriter, and he no longer needed to perform those menial tasks. The newly inducted craftsman could now be left and trusted to stand on his own two feet and provide a professional service in the name of his trade.
There was no passing out parade or cap and gown ceremony, complete with expensive choreographed photo opportunity to acknowledge his achievement, just the endorsement of the master craftsman. That was all it took.
In today’s world, though, you need that piece of paper to back things up – City & Guilds, NVQs, BTECs, or capital Ts. For electricians and plumbers, their work needs to be signed off by a fully accredited engineer. It’s not enough to be good; you need the authority to sign it off, too.
College courses currently offered in the construction trades typically involve almost 2,000 hours of practical and theoretical work. The other 8,000 hours to become an expert (vis a vis the 10,000 hours espoused by K. Anders Ericsson) will, therefore, be earned on the job.
As for professional qualifications, a HND or a university degree comes to mind.
When I stumbled upon my chosen career, I was in my mid-twenties. A little research told me that the quickest way to qualification would be a foundation year in college followed by a two-year full-time university course. Three years out of my life.
I had no dependents. I could do it. But, three years! I’d be 28 by the time I finished.
In a moment of clarity, I told myself that I hoped to reach 28 at some point anyway, so did I want to get there with those qualifications behind me or without? I sucked it up, had a great time doing it, and had the letters after my name to propel me into a bright future of 40 prospective years of decent technical and professional work. Not that anyone has ever asked to see my university certificate, by the way!
PROFESSIONAL BODIES
You might be good at your job. You might have a good little business in the building industry. But how do people know that? How do they find you? What accreditation and, therefore, credentials do you have?
There are several bodies that can provide the desired support and affiliation. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, or RICS, is one. They deserve their own separate section. It’s coming next, especially given recent events at that organisation. (Spoiler alert – juicy gossip coming!)
Then there’s the Chartered Institute of Builders. Their website proclaims them as the world’s largest and most influential body for construction management and leadership. They even offer a Master version of their membership. When you’re handing out your business cards, you could have the letters CIOB or even MCIOB after them. If nothing else, I think it shows prospective clients that you take your day job seriously. If you’ve gone that extra mile to join, and jumped through hoops in order to get there, then I guess that’s a statement of your professionalism and commitment.
I once worked in private practice surveying for a boss who had about ten certificates on the wall behind his desk. He was a manager of this, an expert at that, an affiliate of whatever, and an associate of everything else.
He never said hello in the morning. I’d walk into work, sit down directly opposite him, and he would not say a thing. I used to think, surely rule number one in the management handbook is greet your staff!
Some councils and organisations will only work with lettered people. After all, these corporations and authorities are accountable to their stakeholders. If things go wrong, at least they can show that they tried to find trusted and qualified people to do the work. Membership of a professional body can make you stand out from the crowd. Not everyone joins. Not everyone has to. Yet, it does give an air of respectability