Insights Hub

Contractors fill director roles from their own lane. The supply side runs bigger P&Ls on thinner margins, and almost never gets the call.

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.

Why the first ten years and the last ten need different front doors to the same industry.

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.

Most growing contractors have a chair or a non-executive. Far fewer have anyone whose actual job is to challenge them.

Early careers teams are drowning in requests they cannot answer, while the people the industry says it wants never reach the door.

Boards go outside for a director role far more often than the market justifies. It usually isn't because the external candidate is better. It's because promoting from within means someone has to explain, out loud, why the internal favourite lost.

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.