Stop scoring points and look up

There was a post on LinkedIn recently that opened with a question. Why do so many AssocRICS members try to hide their status? It was posed as if the answer were obvious and the behaviour were fact.

It is not fact. It is an assumption. There was no evidence behind it, no data, nothing beyond one person deciding that a group of colleagues behaves in a way that happened to suit the point he wanted to make. A premise built to start an argument, and a good one, because it worked. The comments filled up. The profession obliged.

I want to be clear about what that post actually was. It was not an observation. It was bait.

It is not the only version of this I see, either. There is a running feud between damp and timber specialists and chartered surveyors that never seems to end. Each side pours energy into criticising how the other works, what the other gets wrong, why the other cannot be trusted. Both are at fault. And in all the time I have watched it, I have never once seen it change the outcome for the actual client. The client does not benefit from the argument. The client never even sees it.

That is the thread running through all of this. So much energy spent by professionals criticising other professionals, and so little of it doing anything useful for the people who actually pay for the work.

I will be honest about something else too. When I see someone whose contribution to this profession is mostly criticism of others in it, I question their motive. I cannot help it. If your presence in this industry is built on telling everyone what your colleagues get wrong, that tells me more about you than it does about them. The original post is a case in point.

Now to the flaw at the centre of the whole thing.

It all rests on the idea that the letters after a name are the measure of a professional. They are not. Letters record a route someone took and an assessment they passed on a particular day. They are a useful signal. They are not the definition of competence, and they never have been.

I know surveyors with the fullest set of letters going who I would not put in front of a client. I know others, further down the alphabet or on a different path entirely, whom I would trust with the most difficult job on my desk. Anyone who has actually run a firm knows this. The letters are not the person, and they are certainly not the work.

While a section of the profession spends its energy ranking colleagues by their designations, look at what is actually bearing down on it.

Artificial intelligence is changing how the work gets done, and it is not waiting for anyone to feel ready. Clients are already using it against us. They are running reports through chatbots and drafting AI-assisted complaints before the ink is dry. Inside firms, people are quietly using three or four unvetted tools with no controls, and often with no one above them aware of it. A mandatory professional standard on AI is already in force, and the honest assessment is that most firms are nowhere near compliant with it. Insurers have started asking about it at renewal.

Then there is the shape of the workforce itself. The average surveyor is in their mid-fifties. A significant proportion of building surveyors are expected to retire within five years, and their knowledge is walking out of the door with them. Behind them, the pipeline leaks badly. A large share of graduates never pursue chartership at all. More than half of surveying graduates leave the profession entirely, and nobody can say precisely why. The APC has a reputation for being hard and inconsistent, and that reputation actively puts good people off before they have even started.

Underneath all of it sits a lack of support that rarely gets spoken about plainly. Sole practitioners and small firms carry enormous risk with no cover, no peer to check their thinking, and no clear route out when they want to retire. Valuers in particular are carrying more risk than ever, with professional indemnity cover tightening around valuation work. A large part of the working week, for many firms, goes on red tape rather than fee-earning work.

I do not describe these things from a distance. I am a trustee of Lionheart, the charity that supports people in this profession when life becomes difficult. I have seen what these pressures do to real people. This is not an abstract list of industry trends. It lands on individuals, on their health, and on their families.

And then there is the one that matters most, and the one with the deepest bite for anyone worried about identity. This profession does not have a clear identity in the eyes of the public it serves. Most people do not really know what a surveyor is, or what a surveyor does. They reach a survey as an afterthought, if they reach one at all. That is the identity crisis. Not whether a colleague writes their designation in full on a LinkedIn banner. The lack of a clear, respected, understood identity for surveying matters far more than anyone moaning about credentials, and it always will.

So when someone tells me they are worried about professional identity, I take the point seriously. Identity is under real pressure. But it is under pressure from technology that is rewriting the job, from a workforce ageing out faster than it is being replaced, from a public that does not understand the value on offer, and from the human toll all of that takes. It is not under pressure from a set of letters.

Those are the forces that will test what it means to be a surveyor.

So here is my honest view, and I will not soften it.

Stop. Stop complaining between yourselves about who put which letters where, and in what order. Stop the point-scoring between disciplines that never reaches the client. It is not a standards issue and it never was. It is ego, and the profession cannot afford the indulgence right now.

There is a version of the next few years where surveyors come through in good shape. It belongs to the firms and the people who spend their energy on the work, who bring good people in by whatever route gets them there, who look after each other, and who stop treating the profession as a hierarchy to be policed.

Grow up, close ranks around the challenges that are actually coming, and get on with it. We do not have the time or the people to waste on anything else.