The Lechley Brief
If you read these essays, you will like the Brief. My weekly email on leadership, talent and what is moving in UK construction and infrastructure, in your inbox every Saturday morning.
Insights Hub
Essays on leadership, hiring and careers in UK construction and infrastructure, and on the people who run its programmes.
Your site manager decides your promotion, not your boss
The QS who wins every argument with the site team is building a reputation that caps them. Promotion to director is decided sideways, not upwards.
Budget 2026: who is going to deliver it?
The Budget moved money to mayors, revived Help to Buy and set an apprentice target. The constraint now is the client-side leaders who can deliver it.
308 senior roles open. One brief posted four times
308 senior director and head-of roles are open across the top contractors, and Balfour Beatty has posted the same Project Commercial Director brief four times.
Skip the subbie packages, stall as a director
The step most ambitious QSs skip isn't a stretch project. It's running an ordinary subcontract package start to finish.
Sector experience is the weakest test for a director hire
Contractors fill director roles from their own lane. The supply side runs bigger P&Ls on thinner margins, and almost never gets the call.
The year we didn't hire anyone
Nobody remembers cutting the trainees in 2009. Ten years on, it is who is missing from every senior shortlist. The long read on downturns and the people we never hired.
Every downturn cuts training. The bill lands a decade later
Construction cuts trainees first in every downturn. The gap shows up a decade later in the senior seats nobody can fill. A hypothesis, and how we'll test it.
Every project starts with setting out
Why the first ten years and the last ten need different front doors to the same industry.
Waiting until you feel ready costs you a year
The QSs who wait to feel fully ready before applying move a year later than the ones who don't, and it shows over a career.
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