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A developer and a law firm say design and build has lost its edge on complex schemes. The contract argument is sound. The harder question is whether clients have the people to carry the risk that comes home.

Mace posted 45 new senior roles this week, over half of all new senior vacancies added across UK construction, mostly associate director grade.

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.

Balfour Beatty's regional civils MD says ECI is how you take risk out of infrastructure schemes. She is right. But the process only works if the right people are in the room on both sides, and nobody puts them on the risk register.

A fortnight of construction headlines, read the way a recruiter reads them, and an honest account of why I am publishing that reading for free instead of keeping it in the drawer.