My growth and development since working at Morris & Spottiswood has been amazing. I’ve had some fantastic opportunities to progress my career, which I’m incredibly grateful for, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come since I started here as an admin assistant in 2015.

Within my first 18 months here I completed my level-2 diploma in Business Administration, and shortly after that, I started working as a buyer in the Tier 2 department.

Although I really enjoyed that role, I was really taken with the idea of Quantity Surveying. Luckily my very supportive manager agreed that it would be a great career move for me, so not long after that I was enrolled onto a Level 4 NVQ for Construction and the Built Environment at college. I was soon promoted to Trainee Quantity Surveyor and worked as a trainee for two years whilst completing my NVQ part-time.

In 2020, after I finished college, I was promoted to my current role of Assistant Quantity Surveyor and started my degree in Quantity Surveying at Salford University. I’m due to graduate in Autumn 2023 and then I’ll be a fully qualified Quantity Surveyor.

In my seven years at Morris & Spottiswood I have been exposed to so many different areas of the business and have grown so much as a person, as well as in my role. It’s not every company that would support such a huge career move!

The fact that it’s such a supportive place to work has enabled me to really grow and develop. I work really closely with other Quantity Surveyors, so I’m always learning and have a great support network. I also attend internal training in areas such as health and safety, management systems, and finance, which allows me to keep developing my knowledge and growing further in my role.

Once I become a fully qualified Quantity Surveyor, there will still be plenty of development opportunities, such as the chance to work on other workstreams or frameworks. Longer-term, there’s scope to become a senior Quantity Surveyor and manage a commercial team.

Since becoming an Assistant Quantity Surveyor, I’ve worked on various different frameworks – predominantly for NatWest and Barclays. For the first year, I was mainly assisting other Quantity Surveyors with smaller tasks on lower value projects, but in the last three years, I’ve been running my own projects from start to finish. That typically involves pricing works, agreeing costs with clients, placing orders, managing variations, invoicing, and close-out. I’ve worked on a wide range of projects from branch or store refurbishments, closure projects and corporate office spaces, to planned fabric maintenance schemes. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn about every aspect of the job and the range of clients we work with.

I expected the role to be challenging, but I don’t think I expected it to be as rewarding as it is. There is a real sense of job satisfaction I find with Quantity Surveying which makes the challenging days worthwhile. Making the required margin for the business unit and successfully handing over a project to a happy client is a really great part of the job.

To be honest, I’d never really considered a career in construction when I was younger, but once I joined Morris & Spottiswood and learned more about the industry and the potential opportunities that are here, I knew it was what I wanted to do.