Big Job? Big Deal
When it comes to proving your skills, size doesn’t matter in construction.
It’s something no one enjoys but something we all have to do every once in awhile: In the last few days I’ve been going through the drudgery of updating my CV, something I’ve not done in the last two years. There are a decent number of recent projects I’ve worked on that haven’t made their way onto paper yet. What a purist would find particularly conspicuous with my work, however, and I am sure some keen recruiter would point out straight off the top, would be that I have not included dollar values of the property projects that I’ve been working on. Recruiters and HR people particularly love these dollar figure metrics, as they think they show your mettle and experience and give some tangible measure to how much of a bad ass you are. I haven’t included them because I think they prove absolutely nothing.
I haven’t always felt this way. For the longest time, I bought into the HR directive, and tried to pump dollar figures into each and every bullet point of my CV, and particularly where related to project size.
‘You worked on a $300 million dollar shopping centre project? Impressive. Tell me more’, I would imagine a grinning interviewer remarking while leaning back in her chair and waiting for me to regale her with tales filled with million dollar checks and enormous quantities of concrete.
But a conversation I had with a colleague a year or so ago has changed my thinking. He was a 30-ish project manager for a mid-sized Melbourne contractor at the time, and had managed two consecutive projects for the same client, both valued at around $20m and both successful. When I asked him what he wanted to do next, he went straight for the money.
‘I want to work on bigger projects,’ he told me. ‘I need to continue to prove myself.’ His clear implication was that in order to keep advancing in his career, size matters.
I didn’t say anything at the time, but have continued to think about the conversation along with reflecting on my past experience. The conclusion I have come to is that, as in many things, size definitely does not matter in property.
I’ve worked on projects large and small throughout my career, and one of the things that I believe keeps people in the industry going is the fact that each and every project is different. Easy client on this one, battle axe or basket case on the next one. This one doesn’t have any time, that one doesn’t have any money. The client on this one has decided to build his building entirely out of special red bricks, this one has gone with prefabricated wood. These differences hold true for the complexity and challenges faced — the ‘hardness’ factor.
I am currently working on a $20 million dollar project that I would hold up to your $120 million dollar project in a heartbeat in terms of issues, challenges, flippy floppy stakeholders and just plain messiness. My $13 million dollar project where the client wanted to build out of only special red bricks was every bit as difficult. And I have a $4 million dollar refurbishment that takes nearly as much of my time to manage as the $20 million dollar one just because the client is a big beast of an organisation. When I think back to all my projects, there’s far more to the story of how impressive or how ‘hard’ they were than the value.
Unfortunately, while I think throwing dollar figures on my resume to substantiate my level of expertise is bullshit, I also think that this opinion will probably put me in the minority and against the expectations of recruiters and the industry in general. I am going to stick to my guns anyway. Success in the property industry still comes down to your ability to work with people, doing what you say you’re going to do (and when you say you’re going to do it), and a heavy amount of common sense. I firmly believe that if you’re in the industry and you think about your own projects, that you’ll come to the same conclusion as I have. Now, if I can only figure out how to illustrate common sense on my CV…
