Workplace

Upwards of 90% of respondents to the BSj/Hays salary survey said they had experienced recruitment problems and more than half of employers noted difficulty in keeping staff.

This is despite bonus payments, once an annual handout, now made quarterly in many cases. One firm told BSj its bonus payment was monthly and had tried a “golden hello” signing bonus of £700. Still the haemorrhaging continues.

With the market in such flux, it is especially important that a consultancy gets it right when recruiting, says Nigel Lewis, regional director of Waterman Building Services in Manchester. Despite the need for an understanding of sustainability issues, consultancies should not forget the basic engineering skills that still define the profession.

During a job interview, most people will say they are very interested in environmental issues and sustainability, Lewis explains. “They’ve visited the websites and feel that is probably the right thing to say. But I want someone who just loves putting things together, or when they were a kid went into the attic and looked at tanks, pumps and boilers. That is still about 50% of what we do.”

Lewis readily acknowledges that he is from the old school, having worked his way up over the past 30 years. At 16 he started a five-year apprenticeship with the engineer DSSR, where he learnt about basic drawing, cost estimating and site work. Nowadays, he says, graduates arrive with little more than a year of light study about such things as mechanics and hydraulics. A lot of this knowledge must be grafted on to a graduate and that sometimes comes as a bit of a shock to them.

“Once you have won a big job and gone through the conceptual stage, you’ve got the hard work of churning out 2000 drawings,” Lewis says. “Pipes need brackets to keep them up. A potential employee should have a good old-fashioned interest in nuts and bolts, eager to be on site and get excited about seeing a welder and wanting to know how he does it.”

New recruits need to be comfortable with detail design work as well as conceptual design thinking. In order to be champions of sustainability, consultants have been letting contractors do more and more of the detail work, such as selecting pump sizes. That’s a contractor’s job, they would say.

The danger for a consultancy is that unless it undertakes detail design, it will hand over part-control of its design work. Also, a consultancy owes it to the client to be able to visit a site and fully understand the installations that are being looked at. It is part of the consultant’s credibility.

Lewis acknowledges the importance of degree work and what it brings to the profession. “I support this and we look to employ good sustainability engineers knowledgeable about carbon and thermal mass issues and good at architecture. If I could find a person like that tomorrow, I’d chain them to the desk. But somewhere down the line, whatever that person conceptualises will need translation into engineering.”

That explains why consultants pay a premium for a mature person who has an HND, on-site experience and a degree on top. “If there were a person standing on Manchester’s Deansgate yelling, ‘I’m 34, got 15 years of practical design knowledge, and I’m also a bit of a wizard at sustainability,’ there would be 20 consultants lining up to interview him,” Lewis says.