Hello friends on the internet! It has been a while, but we have some good news – I got a new job! My new role is with another consultancy in London. I think what drew me in was the potential for more responsibility and the greater opportunity for advancement. I’m still planning on sitting my APC, but I will probably delay it till the back end of 2022 so I can settle into the new organisation and do some good work for the client. Here are some key things I’ve realised over the

Hello friends! 👋 This experimental blogging thing hasn’t gone too well for me thus far. I had an intention to write a post a week from June 2020 … since then I’ve managed only 15 posts (including this one). There are a few reasons why but I don’t think it’s worth making excuses publicly for the world to see – so I’ll just have to try and do better! The ironic thing is I wrote a whole blog post about keeping consistent 🤣 When I first started writing weekly posts my experienc

Hello friends 👋 This week I’m going to briefly go through the Quantification competency. I like this competency as it involves both pre and post contract knowledge. In my short career, I’ve mainly worked on projects in the pre-contract phase, but I’m slowly pushing to address this balance. Like most APC competencies, Quantification is a vast competency, so it’s unlikely you will know everything, but again you will be expected to understand the basics. I’ll follow the format

Hello friends 👋 I’m going to take a bit of a break from the APC competency breakdown this week. This week marks a significant point for me because I’ve managed to put something out for the last 12 weeks. It’s quite difficult putting something out into the void, you know no one is reading but I’m trying to build a portfolio of information that may, someday, be useful to someone. The biggest push to continue writing this weekly blog/newsletter thing has come from watching Ali

Hello friends 👋 This week I’m going to briefly go through the Construction Technology competency. This is probably the competency I am least comfortable with, which is a problem because it is arguably the most important competency we are tested on. Construction Technology is a vast competency, so it’s unlikely you will know everything, but we are expected to know the very basics. The trouble is, for non-cognate graduates, “we don’t know what we don’t know”, and even though t

Hello friends 👋 This week I’m going to briefly go through the Design Economics and Cost Planning competency. It’s probably the competency that I am most comfortable with at present because I have logged a lot of experience against this topic over the last three or so years. I will be only covering Level 1 in this post! To become a chartered quantity surveyor, you have to be certified to a Level 3 status for the following 6 competencies: Commercial management (of construction

Hello friends 👋 This week I want to rant a bit about benchmarking. Benchmarking is a process by which an attribute/performance indicator is compared to other similar projects/attributes/events etc. As a QS you will nearly always get asked to get involved in some benchmarking task and it almost always got to do with the cost! The premise of benchmarking is to identify whether the client is getting value for their project in comparison to other similar projects. Benchmarking c

Hello friends 👋 I hope everyone is doing well and adjusting to the “new normal”. This week I want to talk about my experience with the software that I tend to use as a QS and I want to know what you guys are using too! Microsoft Office: This is a pretty obvious one, I am sure everyone in the world uses Microsoft tools in some form or another. a) Outlook – Emails. Lots and lots of emails. Pretty self-explanatory at this point. b) Word – Used for reports, minutes and bid wri

Hello friends 👋 This will be my sixth newsletter in a row! I am currently writing this whilst sitting in my car in a hospital car park and I needed to do something ‘productive’. I’ve been struggling with getting motivated to do particular tasks even though I know I need to do them. At uni, if I knew had an assignment due in 3 weeks I wouldn’t really get down to writing until I was a few days before the deadline. Terrible I know – but I’m sure many of you can relate. I think

Hello friends 👋 There are many skills you need as a quantity surveyor, not all of which are QS specific. The best QS’s I know share the following traits: Highly Organised Excellent communicators Comfortable with numbers/arithmetic/geometry Great team-players The skills above are generally transferable and can be applied across any industry i.e. finance, general business and consultancy. But for QS’s, there is one skill/characteristic that sets the best QS’s apart – excellent

Hello friends 👋 If, like me, you decided to become a QS after you already completed your first undergraduate degree, and you want to get chartered by the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors), you must complete a conversion course. It’s really important that the course you sign up for is accredited by the RICS. Most of the large consultant QS firms that offer graduate programs will sponsor non-cognate graduates to undertake the conversion course. Bear in mind – whe