Continuing our occasional series, Katie Puckett meets a site manager with an unusual sideline, an entrepreneur turning her attention to the training sector, and a quantity surveyor who has brought army discipline to his job. Portraits by Ed Tyler
Mike Walmsley, Willmott Dixon
Mike Walmsley ICIOB, building manager
Willmott Dixon
Meet Mike Walmsley, leading a double life in construction and law enforcement. From 7:30am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, you’ll find him on site, managing the construction of a new primary school in Macclesfield. But in his spare time, he chases criminals, hunts for stolen cars and keeps the peace in the uniform of a special chief inspector with Greater Manchester Police.
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work in construction or join the police,” he explains. “Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. Specials wear exactly the same uniform, we carry the same cuffs and baton and we have the same powers of arrest in England and Wales. It’s just that the regulars are paid and we aren’t.”
Walmsley has been with Willmott Dixon for almost all of his career. He completed a four-year sandwich degree in construction management at Salford University, briefly working for his sponsor company before joining Willmott Dixon’s management trainee programme five years ago.
He’s something of a high flyer, already managing his own £3.2m project to build a seven-classroom joint-faith primary school at the relatively young age of 28. “I do like responsibility. If the project falls behind or anything goes wrong, it’s down to me,” he says.
But he has arguably even more responsibility within the police. Walmsley signed up as a special constable eight years ago when he was still at university and was immediately hooked. “When I first started, I was working Friday and Saturday evenings in Manchester town centre, when it all happens. At first, it was quite daunting. The first time you step outside, everyone is staring at you and you can develop a bit of a complex. But then you realise they’re not staring at you, they’re staring at the uniform.”
Since then, he’s been through the ranks to sergeant, then inspector. He now works within the road policing unit and commercial team and is developing a new strategy for how specials work across the force, as well as a new duty management system.
He goes out on patrol as much as he can, doing a couple of evening shifts a week or perhaps one at the weekend. His commitment to the force is eight hours a week, which can be taken in a single shift or two blocks of four hours.
“It doesn’t stop. You can go down and work any time, there’ll always be something happening,” he says. “You never know what incident you’ll be responding to next. I’ve been to fights, murders, pursuits. I’ve chased people on foot and in the car, through city centres, through fields, through people’s back gardens. If it was easy all the time, I don’t think I’d be into it.”
A typical Friday evening will see Walmsley on duty, dealing with the public or out with the road policing team. “First, you look at what cars have been stolen that day or the day before, see if any offenders are wanted and pull up their details, then try to pick them up.”
Greater Manchester Police is planning to expand the number of special officers from 450 to 1,000 over the next few years, which should mean further opportunities for Walmsley, who hopes to reach the level of assistant chief officer. Meanwhile, Christ the King primary school is due to finish in March, when he will focus on achieving his MCIOB qualification.
Though construction and policing are very different worlds, Walmsley does find he uses the skills he’s developed in one role in the other. “At times, tempers can be raised on site, and it’s useful to have experience of dealing with people and resolving issues. I’ve learned not to take people at face value. I’ve been to incidents where there’s a guy who’s five foot one and you think ‘I can deal with him’. But you don’t know he’s a 5th Dan in martial arts.” It sounds like the sort of lesson you don’t forget: “I got a bit of a pasting that time,” he admits.
His project management experience has also been invaluable to his project work for the police, and in responding quickly to different incidents: “In construction, you’ve got to think outside the box and find ways around things.”
Special constables are trained for six months, and Walmsley does a day-long refresher course every 12 months. He’s also been on a senior leadership course, over two weekends. “Willmott Dixon give us five days off each year to volunteer, that helps a lot.”
But one thing he’s not trained to do is drive in high-speed pursuits. “That’s a six-week course, so I don’t think Willmott Dixon would let me have time off for that!”
Dawn Parias, Parias Commercial Interiors
Dawn Parias MCIOB, director
Parias Commercial Interiors
Meet Dawn Parias, one of the CIOB’s newest members, who achieved her MCIOB qualification last August, after 25 years in the industry and a late return to education. But soon she’ll be on the other side of the lectern, teaching the CIOB’s Level 3 and 4 diplomas in site management at venues in London and the south-east.
Parias was offered a partnership in a new training venture by her own teacher for the Experienced Practitioner Assessed route, Chris Westacott. In fact, the suggestion came just four hours after she became a CIOB member.
“I hesitated for, oh, about two seconds,” she says. “It’s something I really wanted to do. It first occurred to me when I was preparing for my MCIOB. You have to do a presentation and I didn’t know what to do it on, then suddenly it came to me — I want to become a trainer.”
The new company, now accredited by the CIOB, plans to offer courses at weekends, recognising that today’s employers find it difficult to release key site staff in tightly-programmed working weeks, while weekends are often the only option for the self-employed. The new venture will help to fill a worrying gap in the market, as the number of FE colleges offering CIOB diplomas courses drops in line with cuts in government funding.
Westacott is particularly pleased to have a woman as his partner in the new business, which plans to offer courses from September. “Women are so under-represented in the industry, but they bring a different perspective, and have different skills. Dawn is very single-minded, and very quality-driven.” To prepare for her diversification into training, Parias is currently taking a teaching certificate in adult and further education.
Before she embarked on the EPA, Parias enrolled at her local college in Northampton to study for the CIOB’s two-year Level 4 diploma in site management, winning the CIOB Student of the Year award for outstanding achievement. At this point, she had already spent nearly 20 years in the industry, with family fit-out firm Parias Commercial Interiors.
Her husband is a quantity surveyor, and so is her son, and her father-in-law ran a plastering business. “We built the business up from very small to quite large, reaching a turnover of £4.5m, though that has dropped a bit now.”
Milton Keynes-based PCI specialises in office fit-outs and refurbishments, and Parias plays a central role. “I am the person in the high-vis jacket, a hard hat and boots who goes around checking everything is okay. I have 20 or 30 people on site, and sometimes I have four sites to manage at the same time. It’s very hands-on. I like to be on-site, getting involved, I’m not an office based person.”
She has already been struck by the career benefits that CIOB qualification can bring. “A guy I met when I did the Level 4 course rang me up not long ago. When I first met him, he was a site manager, but now he’s earning £50,000 a year as a project manager. We were chatting about other people on the course — everyone has moved onwards and upwards in their careers.”
Now she hopes to help other people make similar progress. “Nothing would make me prouder than for someone who has been on one of our courses to ring me up and say they’d got a really fantastic job. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and
I can pass on a lot of knowledge and experience. There are so many lecturers who haven’t been on a building site for 20 years, and don’t know the latest thinking.”
She will now spend half her time teaching, and half on site, and hopes to progress within the CIOB. “I’d like to think that I could get my FCIOB at some point.”
Alex Opoku-Boateng, Lamya Construction
Alex Opoku-Boateng MCIPS ICIOB Quantity surveyor
Lamya Construction
Meet Alex Opoku-Boateng, a man who is bringing military discipline to social housing refurbishment. Opoku-Boateng has worked for east London’s Lamya Construction for the past three years, costing and programming Decent Homes upgrades for housing associations in London and the south-east.
In November, he completed a CIOB-accredited postgraduate diploma in quantity surveying at London’s Southbank University, and is now working towards full membership. The qualification will be the latest in a long list amassed since his BSc Hons in Land Economics in his home country of Ghana.
Opoku-Boateng moved to the UK in 2000 to study for an accountancy diploma, gaining the financial skills he needed before entering the British Army as a procurement officer. He spent five years ensuring that soldiers in the field were well supplied with uniforms, spare parts and rations, a job that ranged from fulfilling routine requests through a central stores depot, to tracking down vital vehicle parts against the clock.
He served as part of peacekeeping forces in Cyprus, Yemen and Kuwait, and also saw active service on a six-month tour in Iraq. “That was very stressful,” he says. “The conditions there weren’t good at all, we were living in a field in a tent [in Basra]. I went there just two months after the war kicked off, so there were no buildings at all.”
Like every recruit, Opoku-Boateng had to complete three months of basic training, before he was posted to the 32nd artillery regiment, based in Salisbury. Anyone organising a corproate shooting event might want to note that he is “a very, very good shot”, if a little rusty. “We were trained to use weapons, and learned how to conduct ourselves in the field. It wasn’t easy adjusting from a civilian background to military life, the lifestyle was so different.”
But Opoku-Boateng adapted to strictly-regimented army life, rising to the rank of lance corporal. Back on civvy street, he still lives by the same rigid army discipline, with no tolerance of poor time-keeping. “I am very time conscious, my work starts at 8am and I make sure I am here on the dot. I make sure that whatever I’m supposed to do before lunch, I do or I forfeit my lunch — that’s the way it was in the army.”
To someone with a military background, it is striking how much time slippage is tolerated in construction. The CIOB’s own research shows that two thirds of complex buildings were delivered late in 2007/08 — outcomes that his commanding officers would not have countenanced. “I was very shocked when I first started,” he says. “In the army, you cannot play with a second because if you do, people’s lives are at risk. If you’re supposed to be at a place at a certain time, you have to be there.”
Since he joined Lamya Construction in 2007, Opoku-Boateng has brought his “every second counts” attitude to its contracts. On his current £2m project, he estimates that his approach to eliminating wasted time has saved £500,000.
So how did his colleagues react to this injection of military discipline? “People don’t necessarily want change, they like to stick to the traditional way of doing things. You just have to encourage people, boost their morale, incentivise them to finish at the right time. It isn’t easy, but gradually you can achieve it.”
The army sponsored Opoku-Boateng to study for a masters in supply chain management, and he also became a member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply while in uniform. He’s grateful for the army’s investment in him, and its culture of training everyone to achieve their full potential. “I’ll never say anything bad about the army. If asked, I’d always recommend them as an employer.”
But through construction and the CIOB, he’s found new paths to professional and personal development, and now plans to apply his time management skills to cutting another form of waste: carbon.
