The surveying gap we are not filling

The UK surveying profession has a numbers problem that we are not talking about enough.

More surveyors are retiring than are coming in. Net growth of membership in the UK is in the low single digits. The people who hold the deepest experience are leaving the profession faster than we are replacing them. None of this is new. Most of you reading this already know it. What I want to talk about is the gap that nobody is filling.

We focus, quite rightly, on attracting school leavers and graduates. We talk about apprenticeships, about degree routes, about getting into schools earlier. All of that matters. But it has a lag. Even if every effort lands, the surveyors we bring in this year will not be carrying real load for a decade. The profession needs people who can carry load now.

There are two groups sitting in plain sight that we are not making proper room for.

The trades. And our veterans.

Plumbers, electricians, roofers, joiners, bricklayers, heating engineers. People who have spent twenty or thirty years on site, who know how buildings actually behave because they have taken them apart and put them back together. People whose knees and backs are telling them the next phase of their working life needs to be different, but who have not been told there is a route into surveying for them.

Our service leavers. Engineers, technicians, logistics officers, project managers, people who have run complex operations under pressure, who understand discipline, accuracy, reporting, and accountability. People leaving the armed forces with exactly the mindset surveying needs and almost no clear signposting toward the profession.

The fit is obvious once you stop and look at it. Residential surveying. Building pathology. Construction. Defects diagnosis. Project oversight. Building safety. These are roles where embodied knowledge and lived experience outweigh almost anything a textbook can teach. The bronze sculptor who became a chartered building surveyor. The veteran who came into building surveying after twenty years of service. The cabin crew member who moved into valuation. These stories already exist. They are just not common enough.

A few honest observations on why this gap is not being filled.

• The traditional academic route still dominates the conversation about how someone becomes a surveyor, even though it never had to
• The financial route in for a forty-five year old leaving the trades or the forces is not clear, well-advertised, or well-supported
• Apprenticeships at this end of the age range are barely promoted, and many SMEs do not know how to access the funding even if they wanted to take someone on
• Mentoring is patchy because we have not built proper infrastructure to match retiring surveyors with second-career entrants
• The profession itself does not yet see the trades or the forces as natural feeders, even though logically they should be

And underneath all of that sits the question that bothers me most.

Why are we not attracting more people into what I genuinely believe is one of the most interesting professions in the country?

Surveyors influence almost every consequential decision in the built environment. The work is varied, technical, human, and quietly important. The career arc allows specialism, generalism, fieldwork, advisory, leadership. The people I talk to every week are some of the most thoughtful professionals I have ever come across. And yet the profession remains, to most people outside it, almost invisible. That is a marketing problem before it is anything else, and marketing problems are solvable.

If we are serious about the retirement cliff, this is where we have to look. Not only at the eighteen year olds. At the forty-five year olds in the trades whose knees have had enough. At the thirty-two year olds leaving the forces who do not know surveying is an option. At the returners. At the career switchers. And we have to make the routes in obvious, supported, and worth taking.

I do not have the answer to all of it. But I know what the first move looks like. We start telling the stories of the people who have already done it. The ex-plumber now running a residential practice. The roofer who took a building pathology qualification at forty-eight. The veteran who moved into building surveying and never looked back. They exist. They are quiet. They should not be.

If you are one of them, or you employ one of them, I would like to hear from you.

Nina