The knowledge is walking out of the door

There is a line I keep using. I would love a USB stick that could download a surveyor’s brain before they retire.

I am only half joking. The profession is sitting on decades of judgment that has never been written down anywhere, and a large part of it is heading for the door.

The numbers are not a secret. The average surveyor in the UK is around 55. We are just about replacing the people who leave, and net growth in the UK is tiny. Nine in ten surveyors say their area already feels the skills shortage, and most of them point to the ageing workforce as the reason.

But the headline is not the retirement. It is what leaves with it.

When someone with thirty years behind them walks out, the qualification is the easy part to replace. The judgement is not. Knowing when a survey does not feel right. Reading a client. The instinct that stops a junior making an expensive mistake. We have built almost no formal way to move that across before it goes.

And it matters more now, not less, because of AI. A tool can produce a confident, tidy, plausible answer in seconds. Telling the difference between a good answer and a good-looking one takes judgement. The people who have that judgement in abundance are often the ones closest to retirement, and many of them have decided AI is not their problem to solve.

That is the part that keeps catching my attention. We are leaning on the group most sceptical about new technology to guide the group that grew up with it.

The near-retirement surveyor is the one we need to mentor the AI-native trainee. The two are passing each other on the stairs, and in a lot of firms there is nobody making sure the handover actually happens.

Here is the part I think gets missed. An older profession is not only a problem. It can be part of the answer.

I talk to people coming into surveying later in life all the time. Tradespeople with sore knees and decades on site who are a natural fit for building pathology. Veterans. Career changers. Retired surveyors who are bored and would happily mentor if someone handed them the structure. The appetite from younger people is real too. One small firm I know advertised a handful of apprenticeships and received two thousand applications.

The talent is there. What is usually missing is the bridge. Firms tell me they cannot find anyone, while capable people nearby cannot find a way in. The problem is not just supply. It is connection.

Then there is the firm itself. A lot of principals are reaching retirement with no plan for what happens to the business they spent a career building. For too many sole practitioners, retirement is not a sale. It is a closing date. The relationships, the reputation, the local knowledge, simply switched off.

None of this is cause for gloom. I am an optimist about this profession and I mean it. But optimism is not a plan, and a plan is not something any one person hands down.

Here is the thing. The handover has been debated for years, mostly behind closed doors. In boardrooms, in working groups, in quiet conversations between the people who are retiring and the people who are worried about it. It needs to come out into the open, because the answer is not one person and it is not one professional body. It is collective. It is the profession working this out together.

So I want to hear from you.

If you are coming up to retirement, what do you actually think should happen to all that knowledge? Are you being asked to pass it on, or are you being quietly shown the door?

If you run a firm, have you kept a retiring surveyor on part time? I know some have, and I think it is one of the smartest moves going. Tell me how it is working.

And if you are involved in anything that brings new people in from outside the usual route, the trades, the veterans, the career changers, I want to hear about it. The good initiatives deserve to be seen.

What are you seeing on the ground? What is working, and what is not? Put it in the comments. This is exactly the conversation the profession needs to be having out loud, not behind closed doors.

And if you prefer, send me an email at nina@surveyors-uk.com