The RICS President on How to Get More People into Surveying

Nina Young: 00:08
Hello and welcome. You’re listening to This Is Surveying, the podcast shining a light on the people, ideas, and stories shaping this incredible profession. I’m Nina Young, founder of Surveyors UK and the Surveying Room, the community bringing surveyors together, breaking down silos, and making surveying visible. So for now, let’s dive into our latest episode. Hello everybody, and welcome to This Is Surveying. Today I’m joined by Nick McLean, the 144th president of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Nick took office at the start of this year and it has been a big year to step into. The AI standard came into force in March. The profession is feeling the impact of an aging workforce. And there is a lot of work going on to shape how the next generation of surveyors are coming through. It’s indeed been a very busy year. Before RICS, Nick spent 37 years at CBRE. He founded the firm’s Middle East Business in 2004 from a single Dubai office and grew into a regional operation across six markets. He left at the end of 2024 to concentrate on the presidency. He is Scottish, a fellow of the RSES, a global Scot, and the Scottish government’s trade envoy to the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. Before all of that, he served in the Royal Navy, which is where his lifelong interest in hydrography began. He was made OBE in 2024 for services to trade and bilateral relations. He is on also one of the most openly candid voices leading a professional body that I have come across, which is why I’m particularly glad to have Nick on the podcast today.

Nina Young: 02:00
So without further ado, welcome, Nick.

Nick Maclean: 02:03
Thank you very much indeed, Em, for those words. And I now hope I don’t let you down.

Nina Young: 02:08
I’ve built you up now. That’s that’s it. So one of the things that I’m interested in is going back to your early career. Because a lot of people I ask on the podcast is, you know, how did you come into surveying and things like that? But the part I’m interested in, just just to touch on briefly, is your experience and time in the Navy and also the fact that you’ve mentioned quite a few times about the importance of hydrography and the blue economy. And I believe Gordon Johnston was actually on the first RSE pop RSES podcast that you did, who’s in hydrography. Why, why is it? How do you see it as important to society as a role as a profession in that area?

Nick Maclean: 02:55
Hydrography is one of the, I think, one of the hidden gems of our ISIS. We have 25 pathways into qualifying as child surveyor. And the concept of surveying is to audit or record or measure our built environment. And of course, as the the oceans and seas make up the majority of the surface area of the world, I think this is a very, very important part of our future development as a profession. And there’s of course a lot of conversation around the importance of the littoral waters around our coastlines at the moment for national security, but also in G course, I think, for exploring the opportunities for deposits and other things that the oceans give us. And to do that properly and to protect the marine environment, but also to use its resources. We need people who understand that environment. And therefore, the ability to properly chart and protect the ocean floor and the environments that are perhaps less explored than the near space around this planet, we can be at the forefront of this profession going forward. And there’s a component also of as certain parts of the world re-look again at their defense commitments. One of the defence commitments is going to be ensuring the security of the littoral waters around our coastline. So I suspect that this is a component of our profession is going to become more and more important over the next few years.

Nina Young: 04:26
It’s one of those areas that I must admit I don’t come across very often across surveying, because I speak to all surveyors from all backgrounds. And it is an area, uh sort of a specialism. I guess it’s a niche, and I want to imagine it’s quite a small proportion of the membership.

Nick Maclean: 04:39
It is. It’s a small but as my friend Gordon Johnson said, small but diamond-like, and it’s important to the profession. So it’s a very specialist skill set, but it’s one which is important increasingly to governments around the world. And therefore, I think it raises the profile of our ICS overall. And I think we as an institution benefit from all these 25 different pathways. We have people know us as land surveyors, and they should know us too as sea surveyors as well.

Nina Young: 05:08
Sea surveyors, sea surveying. Yeah, I think I think absolutely true. I have had a marine surveyor on the podcast who surveys boats, which is very similar to property surveying, very, very similar. And I have spoken to a cargo, marine cargo surveyor, and it is absolutely fascinating. I find that side of it really interesting. One of my favorite conversations was with the marine surveyor, slightly different from what you’re talking about, but still the things he has to get involved with and the similarities across different types of surveying never ceased to amaze me. And I do think I think I need a deep dive with the hydrographic surveyor on this podcast. So I’ve got that on my list to get a bit more exposure with it.

Nick Maclean: 05:51
Well, I’ll introduce you to some important people in hydrography because you’ll have a fascinating conversation with them. And that the crossover with RICS is that there are lots of members of the Royal Institution who are also reservists with the Royal Navy. So um it’s a component which is close to my eye. I spent 18 years or so as a reservist with the Royal Navy. So and I know they are dedicated and passionate. So our pathways intertwine quite a lot.

Nina Young: 06:15
Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, that would be really good to get some uh get some exposure on the

Nina Young: 06:20
on the podcast and things and listen to it, because uh it is an area that does fascinate me as well on a on a personal level. One of the things that you and I have discussed before, and I know I’ve been sort of watching and seeing sort of the things you’ve been involved with this year, incredible things and very busy. You seem to be always somewhere traveling, seem to be visiting a university or a college. I think what really comes across from your presidency, from from my view, is your passion for education.

Nick Maclean: 06:54
So when I came into office, I set out at my inauguration that I thought the RICS should have three pillars of concentration while I’m in this chair. Um education, influence, and confidence. And I chose education because ultimately, and through our public interest, public advantage responsibility through our raw charter, you can distill quite a long paragraph to say that our responsibility ultimately is to educate surveyors so that they don’t let down their clients and they can keep up with developments in the marketplace. So our ISS is, in my view, primary responsibility is to ensure that our membership is properly educated to fulfill their functions. And if we if we do that, then we can grow our influence with governments and lawmakers and regulators around the world, not just in the UK. And that in turn gives them and us confidence and self-confidence. And that leads to the influence that we have on those lawmakers to be much greater. And I put it to uh a government, a politician recently that if you look at our membership, 142,000 members practicing in 146 countries, I think, that’s an extraordinary experiential database. And we we talk about AI, and I think we’re going to talk about later, but just what’s embedded in the brains of our 142,000 members around the world is an extraordinary level of experience. And somewhere, someone in this institution, somewhere in the world, will have dealt with some of the problems which are pretty relevant and common to most governments. And our role as a convenient of this information that we know somewhere somewhere that’s may have a solution, or even if it’s not a solution, may have seen a solution which hasn’t worked, and we can prevent other lawmakers making the same mistake. So if we can harness that, as I say, experiential database, then we will absolutely prove our worth.

Nina Young: 08:53
That’s so very true about that, about that knowledge, that information, that expertise. It’s so valuable. And as we’ll come on to talking about AI, it’s increasingly more valuable. And it’s how you capture, how you capture that, how you capture that data and that experience and that knowledge. And, you know, when we’ve talked about and we’ve seen, you know, conversations around the aging workforce. You know, is it is it are we currently at the average age of 50 in our ICS membership?

Nick Maclean: 09:22
I mean, that’s a guess, but it yeah, between 40 and 45, something like that. But it’s increasing. It’s reflecting our demographic, particularly in the Western Europe and the US. So the the age profile of the membership is growing. And again, that’s another important uh concept of why education is responsible. We can’t continue to have the average age grow. We’ve got to bring more people into the profession from the ground floor, as it were. Um, so making the profession attractive or the whole of the sector, not just membership of this institution, but making the built environment as a profession in attractive to younger people, and at the same time remembering that we’re in competition with so if we want the best grads, we’re in competition with people who develop AI or other forms of technology or in due course defense or the other components of professional life going forward. So we need to do something to make sure that the training regime we do through our accredited courses and evolution of the APC means that we continue to get very good people who have a big picture mindset. So one of the components we what we’re working on at the moment is how do we do that? How do we make grads who may do an accredited course want, after that three-year course, if they’re undergrads, stay with us? That’s a conundrum because our courses, the accredited courses we have, seem to give people a good grounding to get a role. So that if we track the people who are unemployed after six months from our course, it’s very small. But the number of people who actually come into the profession proper is actually disproportionately low. So what that means is the universities are training good generalists, but they’re seduced to do something else other than build environment. And we’ve got to seduce them back, frankly.

Nina Young: 11:13
Right. So make it more attractive. I think that’s what we we talked about. Something that you mentioned in the building magazine was around that maybe the RSCS has been a little bit too meek about the value of being chartered.

Nick Maclean: 11:27
Yeah. It’s a it’s a trend that we’re sharing with all the other professional institutions at the moment and the professions, whether it be law or accountancy or even medicine, at the moment, we look to see whether we’re lagging behind or whether we’re doing something that we can learn something from the other professions. But actually, the reality is that we’re all the professions are going through a similar stage. And geographically, I just come back from a trip from Asia Pacific. I saw eight universities across APAC, and they’re all in the same boat. So the conversion rate from accredited degrees or specialist degrees to practitioners in the profession is under quite a lot of threat because the opportunity is so broad for people who are deemed to be of good quality.

Nina Young: 12:10
Yeah, it’s it’s kind of an area that I don’t feel gets talked about enough, is that competition for grads once they’ve qualified, I would always step back have assumed, you know, oh, they’ll just, you know, continue and become a chart surveyor. But I kind of wasn’t really aware how actually important it is to be able to stand against other actual professions, if that makes sense.

Nick Maclean: 12:33
Yeah. And I think we, as I say, we’re looking very closely at this. Is it pay? Do we pay our grads enough? Maybe not. Is it that they want to we haven’t made them interesting enough so they understand the full width of the components that they can go into once they’ve done one of our accredited degrees? Is it that the competition elsewhere is just more compelling? So, re-looking again at the communications path, how we interact with students whilst they’re at university, whilst they’re at undergrad level, is all going to be important. So we need to look to see how we can entice or persuade or compel some of these students to come into the profession going forward. Because there’s no doubt about it, on the work that we’re doing with the this the concept called skills gap, we are not going to have enough surveyors to do all the things we want in our existing markets. If we then look at some of the emerging markets that need professionals in the built environment, then we’re going to be grossly undersupplied globally going forward. So we’ve recognized it’s our responsibility, along with the other institutions and professions, to make our collective world, as it were, more attractive going forward.

Nina Young: 13:42
I think that obviously makes sense as to why we’ve got the new pathway that’s come out. Is it the data technology? Uh forgive me, I can’t remember what it’s actually called. There’s a new pathway coming to the ways.

Nick Maclean: 13:53
Yeah, so we’ve got three new pathways: retrospective refit of residential accommodation, sustainability, and data analytics. And they were introduced really as a request from employers that they sure saw an absence of specialists in these three areas, and I think we’ll have some more coming down the line. So we need to keep the number of pathways, the diversity of our profession, relevant to allow them, allow employers to pick specialists who have increasingly relevant fee incomes related to these three areas going forward. If I may say so, also what we’re also trying to do is modularize

Nick Maclean: 14:30
education so that for a 21-year-old qualified valuer, 20, let’s say 24-year-old qualified valuer, we touched upon AI. If we want to make this profession relevant, then it’s probable that people now won’t follow the same kind of career paths that I did, do the same thing for 37 years. So we need to find flexibility to allow a 24-year-old valuer to become, as we talked about, a 34-year-old hydrographer and a 44-year-old property manager and a 54-year-old Lansayor. I’m being extreme, but whatever it is, they stay within the built environment and hopefully membership of the RICS. But we allow them to migrate and transition their career through the whole of their professional lives. So this concept of lifelong learning, which the government is very keen on, is something that we need to embrace to ensure that our membership don’t feel they have to leave because their job has been expunged or is no longer relevant. They can stay. And the other advantage of doing this is that if we have someone who’s got plenty of life experience but from a completely different sector, let’s say oil and gas in the northeast of Scotland, they can come into the built environment in a way that they probably can’t at the moment without going back to full-time education. And that’s, as we keep reading, out of bounds because of cost or commitment, family commitments, et cetera, et cetera, to some people. So we’ve got to find a way of recruiting more people into the system who may not have thought about it when they were 18.

Nina Young: 16:01
I think that’s I think that’s a really important point. I think that’s that is a significant opportunity when when you look at, you know, ex-forces, ex-navy moving across, you know, I I know a few have moved across into surveying and the skills that they bring and the discipline and it they’re just such a good natural fit. And then you have your trades, and you know, some of them are a really good fit for residential surveying because they understand how a you know a house is constructed. They understand the fundamentals. And I think I think more people, if it’s made easier, I I can see there being quite a move across from trades. Because a lot of them people, you know, I’ve heard it, builders, oh, my knees are going, you know, I’m getting but they are actually moving across and training to be a residential surveyor. So I think that’s a huge opportunity.

Nick Maclean: 16:51
And and what we need to embrace is practical experience and judgment. And if we see potential candidates who’ve got both those skills and experience too, then we should allow them a pathway into joining this profession in some way or another. So getting grads or apprentices or day release students into the profession at the beginning is very important, but so are bringing people who are changing their career at their midlife point, uh, we need to bring them in too. Because going back to that concept you mentioned earlier, the the demographic means that we will have less and less graduates around and we’ll be fighting more and more for them. So the competition is going to heat up. So why are we not embracing another pool, as it were, of labour from people later in their lives?

Nina Young: 17:40
Who bring different skills, experience, life experience, running their own businesses. They bring a different skill set into it as well. It’s kind of emotional intelligence and things like that.

Nick Maclean: 17:50
Whereas the enemy is a very important thing. And we recruit accountants and lawyers when they see the error in their ways and they want to become surveyors.

Nina Young: 17:56
Is that a day? Because I’m a chart accountant, I see the error of my ways. Indeed. So I I do understand as being a charter count myself, that the importance of chartership and you know, how hard I had to work to be to to become chartered and how how proud I I feel and and and having that. So I kind of can identify with it. And I just think it’s an interesting thing when I look back and think I kind of fell into being a chartered countant, to be fair, like most people fall into surveying. And, you know, at the time though, I don’t ever remember seeing any roles for chartered surveyor, but there was plenty for being a chartered accountant. When I look back, and I think had there been, I probably would have gone for the chartered surveyor, but we are.

Nick Maclean: 18:40
And and we have we have some very uh and a very interesting group of people who are co-qualified either as solicitors or barristers or engineers who are also child surveyors. And I think we’ll see a lot more of that. So a as we grow our volume of pathways, a someone who like you is a child surveyor, but with a deep interest in real estate, how do we make it possible for you without burdening your life to become a member of this institution too? So you have dual qualifications. So I think the concept of looking and and the same with um planners or architects at the moment. So we’ve got to embrace other professions that will help us have a broader perspective as a profession as a whole. And I I caveat all this with but the conundrum for us, well not the conundrum, the thought process for us is not reducing the qualification quality at the moment. And so we need to have these transitional courses brought in so someone who’s done nothing in the built environment can come. These will be smart people anyway. How do we get them in without it taking them 15 years or whatever it might do?

Nina Young: 19:47
So and that and kind of and this topic as well around education, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about around AI was where how AI is impacting, you know, graduates now coming through haven’t used AI for the last three years. They come through university, they’ve got used to using it, and they come out and they qualify. Um and then we have um an aging demographic in surveying. Um, many who are close to retirement. Um, and I’ve heard many conversations around, you know, that they’re quite anti-AI or they don’t want to be adopting this new technology when they’re due to retire very soon. And yet we need these firms and these leaders to lead. And so you’ve got the graduates coming

Nina Young: 20:30
in with the expectation, and I haven’t seen necessarily fallout from that yet, but I’m kind of imagining if I was a graduate and then I come to a firm and they haven’t particularly adopted AI yet, or they say, no, you can’t use it. And I know this does exist, and I think that will change, but I think we’ve got that challenge at the moment where you want the senior surveyors to lead in this technology. Does that make sense?

Nick Maclean: 20:57
Yeah, and I I understand the anxiety of people starting their career. Is my if you’re a junior value or a junior quantity spare, is the concept of the profession I’m about to join still going to exist because AI can automate it? And we again, we’ve been thinking quite a lot about this at the moment. And we’re comforted by the fact that because of the medium-term shortage of the number of professional people, then I think the profession as a whole won’t diminish in overall scale. But it we need to build in flexibility to the learning courses that we put on because people perhaps need to come into their chosen components of the profession in a slightly different way. Yeah, I hear the anxiety amongst some of our members, but I probably the same anxiety was uh quoted for a Carter in 1800 when they saw the arrival of the railways. Um, it hasn’t led to less employment. It’s just less to left uh led to different employment. So I I think yes, there will be a transitional period, but provided we can be flexible in the education path, I see no diminution in the number of professionals. In the built environment, needed going forward. And then that leads me to the final thing we’re trying to do with the educational progress. The mobility of people who work in the sector, I think, will increase as not just for economic circumstances where one convergence of the market is down and another is up, but I think even within components of the same country or region, et cetera, et cetera. So what we’ve also been working on at the moment is the concept of equality of RICS qualification with national or regional qualifications, to make sure governments and regulators and lawmakers understand that our membership can help whatever national problems they’ve got, even if it’s away from Europe, whether it be in the Middle East or South America or Asia Pacific. So I think the mobility of the qualification is the one of the single most important components of membership of this institution going forward. And if you look at my career, I practiced at Europe and I lived in the Middle East for 21 years. I did that because I was qualified through an institution that was recognized by governments overseas. If I didn’t have that qualification, it would have been much more difficult. I at the moment are spending my life, quite a lot of my life, talking to politicians to say we there’s a pool of labour that is our reserve that can come and help you if needs be. And similarly, I want your citizens to come and help other locations in the world with this qualification who are desperately in need of new professionals. So I think mobility of the RI that the RICS membership gives is very, very important.

Nina Young: 23:34
Yeah, it is actually. And it’s it I don’t think it’s something that’s necessarily discussed a lot across the board about what it enables. You know, when I when I look back and think, I remember thinking, I think it was one of my dreams as when I was very young was to live in Canada. I thought I want to live there. And I remember looking at my accountancy qualification to see if I could do it, and I could because I was a chartered accountant and it was recognized. And looking back at that, and I don’t think it’s something that increasingly mobility, you know, at the end of the day, you can do you can set up a business everywhere anywhere now. And the fact is that I think more discussion around that and what it enables as a global qualification is is really important. But I I yeah, it’s good.

Nick Maclean: 24:20
And we do that through asking the sort of conversation that I’ve had during the course of this series. I go to a a government somewhere in the world and say, here is your own regulator on the built environment, here’s this qualification, have a look at the curricula, and you’ll see it’s of high quality. Give them equivalence to your national qualification or exemption from having to re-qualify in your territory. And such is the long-term influence of our ISCS. I’ve never been turned down by meeting senior politicians that we can have that conversation. So it’s logical because we don’t come just for the benefit of our members, but we come because we can provide solutions to territories which are struggling with developing their own labour pool, as it were, in some of the things that we do. So we we bring an issue that will benefit our members, but we also bring a solution to governments who are need to grow the professions in their own territories. We move the barriers. Yeah. For mobility. And it’s not just a one-way street. If we have equivalents here too, that we recognise some overseas institutions too, then we can bring in when we have shortages those folk to UK when we need them.

Nina Young: 25:29
One of the um things that I know you’ve talked a lot about is is going kind of touching it it does involve AI, but it’s around judgment. There is a lot of discussion around across across the board at the moment, around the importance of judgment. AI, you know, won’t replace surveyors, and which I agree with. I think it it won’t. I think it’s it will change elements and areas, but I don’t feel I think it’s going to create new roles in many different ways. Um, but judgment in itself, the the thing I wonder is, and I know there’s been a lot of people asking this question, and no one, no one has seemed to have the answer. It’s a difficult question, is if you have increasingly younger generations not getting the experience of being, you know, literally making mistakes, you know, the the mundane tasks that, you know, as you learn, basically as you evolve before you qualify, and some of those elements are replaced, those tasks are replaced with AI. Are they still going to get enough learnings to then develop their judgment expertise because that’s what they need later on to then judge whether an AI and its outputs are reliable or you know, that kind of thing. I always I I think this is across the board, this is all this is all professions work. It’s like we’ve seen it, seen it in law, you know, with paralegals and things, you see those roles being replaced. I’m like, but how do they then get that experience and judgment later on?

Nick Maclean: 26:57
Yeah, it it’s a it’s a it might be our biggest single issue in for young surveyors, I think, everywhere. And I’ve uh you mentioned I’ve been to see lots of universities and had lots of conversations with professors at the moment. And I’ve asked an extremely naive question from an because I’m not an academic, is how do you teach judgment? And how do we incorporate it into degree courses, or how do you learn the facility of showing good judgment? And I’ve had answers from uh head scratching and ooh, that’s bloody difficult, or to we need to reinstill the concept of rhetoric in courses. Um, because one very smart person told me the other day that there’s no point in just teaching judgment. It’s the communication of judgment which is equally important. And therefore, students must regain the ability to think in the concept of rhetoric because they need to, for a value, they will recognize this phrase, stand back and look so they can determine when AI is giving them the wrong answer. But then they need to be able to communicate to their client or to the person, their boss or their the people they’re advising why that’s not right. So it’s not just good enough to recognize the problem. You need to be able to communicate why it’s wrong too. But we’ve addressed it before when from Avocus to Calculator, from Paris tables to automated valuation models. So we’ve kind of been there before. The difference this time is that the graduate recruitment is under pressure at the moment, in some part because employers don’t know where AI is going to go. And at the moment, we still need that ability to express judgment going forward. And the conundrum we’ve got is how do you get from start day one to five years of experience if no one’s recruiting at day one? And some believe that’s because you recruit, you steal from other firms. But if everyone’s doing that, that’s not the answer, not the solution. So I haven’t seen an adequate explanation as to how we get people in to the profession at the moment to give them that experience where they can show professional judgment going forward. But we’re working on, we’re talking to employers and to universities and others at the moment, and we’re asking you also big questions of the universities. Is undergraduate education right for the professions? Is that concept changing? Do we do therefore, do we concentrate much more on apprenticeships or do we have some other form of education so that it’s not full-time education? That broadens the appeal of the profession to the people who otherwise couldn’t afford it or don’t want to for other circumstances. Um and it would reduce, as it were, the cost to employers through the process. But but actually, I still don’t have the answer. And to try and overcome this, we are convening a round table during the course of next year of people from academia to say these are the big questions on our profession going forward. This is a very impressive group of smart people. Help us come to the right answer.

Nina Young: 29:58
Yeah, it is extremely difficult. It’s it’s it’s really hard. My brain’s not gonna I’m not gonna have the answer, but it’s such a difficult thing. And it’s it’s said time and time again at the moment, we seem to be in this stage where as increasingly we’re having more adoption of AI, then you’ve got increasingly people talking about the importance of judgment. AI will not replace surveillance. But that judgment, you know, I I foresee is gonna be one of the most, the most important, probably, human skills that we have going forward across the board, all areas. I think it’s the ability to question what the AI does, because increasingly it will do more of the work, and then you have to judge whether that’s acceptable or correct.

Nick Maclean: 30:44
Yeah. And I wouldn’t underestimate the uh importance of communication because ultimately, what’s a professional? A professional is someone who has the ability to deliver bad news well. Yes. Because they they need to say respectfully, sir, you’re paying my fee, but I think you’re wrong. But here’s the solution. So we need to ensure that people are, and this goes back to one of the three concepts we talk about, confident enough in their own ability, their own technical training, to be able to say to their client, that’s not right, sir, or madam.

Nina Young: 31:14
Yeah. Going on to the AI standard, which I was extremely pleased came out in March this year, very much ahead of the curve, I think, across all the professional bodies have been tracking things that have been happening across professions, primarily

Nina Young: 31:30
in the UK. And I was just, you know, very pleased to see it actually happen. And also the fact it’s it’s been more focused around regulating conduct. I don’t feel it’s stifling, you know, the adoption of AI, which is important. How have you felt it’s things have evolved since? Because I know you were very pivot pivotal in the standard. How do you feel? Have you seen what’s your thoughts and sentiment as to AI adoption and and the standard and where we are at the moment?

Nick Maclean: 32:01
So we uh yes, it was very important because the ethics of using. We had an interesting debate in Turnlitch. Should we go further in talking about the concept of using AI? Um my personal view is actually we don’t know enough about it. We’re not AI experts. We can talk about the use of it, but we can’t give guidance. And some SMEs are asking us to give guidance to how they use AI, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable because we’re not qualified to do that. There’s another iteration of the standard coming out shortly. And I think if we focus on ethically what does it mean to be a professional using AI, AI is simply another tool in the way that Paris for Valuers was or your calculator is. I just spoke at a conference a few days ago, and there’s some very different thinking coming out of the US in particular at the moment that talks about where should liability shift and is this a good thing for professions? So should liability shift to the software houses rather than the professional? I think that’s the thin end of the wedge for professions because the software houses are responsible for writing the algorithms or the tools themselves. But the the professional with all their focused training is the person who will or won’t use the tool appropriately. You don’t blame a gardener because their trial is made by a poor quality manufacturing process. You blame the gardener. And that’s the way I think it should be, and that’s the way we develop our standards going forward. And I think that AI will I I think our big problem is at the moment is we just don’t know what AI is going to do for us. And all the conversation on the broader picture whether it’s going to lead to the extinction of the human race over as we’ve seen in the papers over the last few days or so, these are very heavy, big topics. We’re not qualified to qualify uh do this, but we know what we expect from a qualified member of this institution, that you need to be cautious and careful. And the responsibility for the your conduct and the advice you give your clients rests entirely with the surveyor. And that cannot be delegated to any other tool or instrument used.

Nina Young: 34:07
Absolutely. Yeah, cannot. Although, you know, this is what the professions are. Somebody’s held accountable and responsible for their opinion.

Nick Maclean: 34:16
And just going back to the point we made about equivalence of our qualification, what uh I I didn’t appreciate, but now I do, is that when we talk to overseas governors, the single most important component of our ICS membership is the ethical standard by which we hold our members to account. Because we hear from time and again, real estate can be a wild west of a profession from time to time. But if you have a group of professionals who are bound by an ethical standard by the institution of which they’re a member, then that gives comforts to comfort to regulators and governments around the world going forward. So the importance of our ethical standard, not just in AI, but the use of the way we advise a plant and the way we stand to our the advice we give is, I think, increasingly important, particularly in the emerging markets, to the future employment of members of our institution and the profession.

Nina Young: 35:13
It is, it is, it’s interesting that you you’ve mentioned a few times now about the the international element and things, even though it’s the biggest membership is the UK. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, a lot of people don’t talk about all the international. I think something I read about Australia and the skills shortage they’re experiencing. So even smaller memberships are still experiencing the same challenges in very much as the UK is.

Nick Maclean: 35:39
And then not just Australia. So I went to Australia early in the year. We were very pleased to be able to talk to the federal and state government in New South Wales to say this is becoming a problem because they’re uh many of the Commonwealth countries in particular have the same age profile that we do here. So there’s going to be a quite an acute problem in the next 20 years. So we have to grant accessibility for people who are qualified from some other markets and make sure it’s not wrapped up in a slightly facetious immigration argument going forward. We can help you economically by making our membership mobile and come to help from time to time. And a surveyor may work in the goal for in Australia or New Zealand or the US from time to time, then come back to the UK, depending on where the economic opportunities are going forward. So uh taking down the barriers to entry from people who’ve done technical training, I think is very important, not just for the selfish benefit of our own members of this institution.

Nina Young: 36:40
Yeah, because it’s mobility, international mobility, as you mentioned earlier.

Nick Maclean: 36:43
Yeah. And mentioned uh just come back from APAC, and uh it’s remarkable I visited four major cities who are employers of our members, and I could impertinently scratch out the name of the politician I was speaking to and just sub m substitute and the name of the next city I visited, and their problems are the same. What do we do about housing? What do we do about infrastructure? What do we do about cross-border capital to bring me more investment? What do we do about the standard of buildings? Do we embrace modern methods of construction? So these are the exactly the same conversation, regardless of which country or city I was in. So our role is to make sure that we have this body, this cadre of people who are able to practice regardless of where they are going to go in the world going forward.

Nina Young: 37:28
No, I think that’s it’s

Nina Young: 37:30
it’s a very interesting topic, mobility. And I think, like we’ve talked about the age and demographic, the challenges and new entrants into surveying, it makes sense that it applies internationally and not just the UK. Obviously, what I will see and a lot of people will see here is the UK and the UK challenges. But I think to hear that the same challenges are being had internationally, and there is also a desire for the mobility. So, like you say, enabling someone that’s in a different country to move to the UK or vice versa, and not have to jump through loads of hoops.

Nick Maclean: 38:07
Yeah. And the specific conversations we’ve been having recently is okay, is RICS membership enough for visa qualification regardless of where in your world? And in some locations it is, in some locations it isn’t, and we’re targeting the locations where it’s more difficult, particularly for those who want to go to a territory where a job is the primary qualification for a visa rather than their academic or professional qualification. That to me is a clear barrier to entry. If I come back to your point, yeah, we are we’re doing this, but at the same time, we’re not forgetting that two-thirds of our membership is in the UK. So maintaining the relevance of this profession to a person who works in an SME doing home surveys or valuation or property management, whatever it might be, that’s equally important. And the demands on the institution are becoming ever more well, the demands are growing on the profession to be to do things more quickly and more make them more relevant. And we are a not-for-profit, we’ve got limited income. So where I think AI is going to help us is that we can we can do more for the same amount of money and reinforce the thinking or how we do that by um using forms of technology. And if I may, the f the final thing I would say about the the membership, the other thing that we’re working on at the moment is the the tangibility of membership. So we know very well that our 142,000 members are almost 99% proud of being a child surveyor. But I think we might have relied too long for relying on that pride. So where we want to go with membership of this institution, it’s fantastic, you’re proud. But it goes back to the meekness comment. But now I want to give you something tangible for your career. So it means you’ll be paid more relative to a non-qualified person, or you’ll have a better career prospect, or you’ll have a better career development prospect, or you will learn more, and your clients and your employers will pay you more than an equivalent person without the qualification. So a movement towards tangibility of membership in the institution, I think, is critical. Or next downturn in the economy, people will say, Well, it’s just not worth it. So tangibility is a very important piece of work that we’re working on at the moment.

Nina Young: 40:23
Okay. Interesting. With regards, we’re coming towards the the end of uh the podcast today. There’s one one last thing that I’d like to ask, Nick. Obviously, you know, you’ve got a few months left of the presidency. What things stand out for you during your presidency so far? You know, any particular conversations or anything that you’ve seen, anything that surprised you? And also when you get to the end of the presidency, what would you like to have seen moved, or what do you feel has moved?

Nick Maclean: 40:56
Um I think the first thing to say is the RICS is a very different organization to where it was three or four years ago. You know, we have one or two adventures, they’re all long behind us now. And I think every meeting we have, and it um and this is a full-on-on job, is about how do we get this institution to be better and more relevant to our members and more influential, going back to those three canons, as it were, of uh what we want to do with this institution. So, and all our staff members, of which we have 700 or so, we know that that’s what’s driving them going forward. The second thing is we grow we’ve grown our volunteer membership. So three years ago, I think we had 800 volunteers who stood up to have some form of involvement in the governance. We today have about 1,800. So that tells me that we’ve made quite good progress about bringing people who may five years ago have been disillusioned with us to come back and now want to make a difference to this institution going forward. So that’s great. But I think as a president, what I’ve really been chuffed about is as I’ve gone around the world, no one says no to meeting the president of the RICS, however senior they are as a profession. That’s pretty that’s the kind of confidence that we need to instill in our membership. So this is an institution that has a disproportionate influence on the way that the built environment is going to grow going forward. Um and perhaps out of UK, maybe we’ve got our membership is a little less cynical, or maybe we don’t, it’s not taken for granted in the way that some perhaps see it in the UK. But we are very acutely aware that it this is a founded in the UK. It’s not a UK organization with international branches, it’s an international organization. And if we want to be relevant around the world, um, then we have to reflect the views of all our members wherever they sit. And it may be irrelevant to uh one or two practitioners, but it keeps their fee down because as we grow, we can do more. And we are extremely ambitious for this institution. And the frustration of the moment is we can’t move quickly enough because we just don’t have the money to do it. So the bigger we grow, the more money we get. And I say again, we’re not for profit. So we’re not squandering or putting a surplus aside. We spend every penny we have on developing APC or CPD or whatever it might be, and we can do more if we have more members. So I am very ambitious for the growth of this institution going forward so we can do more more quickly.

Nina Young: 43:36
I have certainly noticed change over the past few years. I definitely have. I posit in a positive move. I definitely have seen that and I’ve heard that from members a lot.

Nick Maclean: 43:46
So I’m the first to admit, and I got on my hind legs and said we’re not utopian yet. And we we do make mistakes from time to time, frankly. But uh and going back to that meek point, I think we need to be prepared to make more mistakes because we need to take a little more risk. And therefore, if we take more as some of those, we’re going to get wrong. But everything is done with all the intelligence and information we have at the time when we make those decisions. But there’s no decision that I’ve been, and I’ve been involved in the RICS for the last six years or so, governing council, et cetera. There is no decision that I’ve seen we’ve made, which is not for the right reasons.

Nick Maclean: 44:20
Subsequently, it may prove to be not right, but unless we’re prepared to take the risk for change to make this right up to date, as it were, then our pace of change will be too slow for most of our members.

Nina Young: 44:32
Yeah, and that’s the biggest risk, isn’t it? Not doing anything.

Nick Maclean: 44:34
And I’m happy to stand up and say, guys and girls are sorry, I got it wrong. But it was done with the right information at the time. So yeah, and if we admit, sorry, that didn’t work, or it was here’s the reasoning we did it, it was worth a risk. I think we should say that. And after at the end of the day, almost all our members are in business. They make the go through the same decision-making matrix as we do. Sometimes you invest in something that doesn’t work. But if you don’t invest, your your businesses and we will be lesser for it.

Nina Young: 45:05
Absolutely. I can resonate with everything you’re saying there. Before I finish up for today, is there anything else that you would like to share with listeners? So we have listeners across the board, all types of surveying. We have students listening, even the public listening, had feedback on that as well, spreading awareness of surveying. Is there anything yourself you’d like to like to share?

Nick Maclean: 45:27
I I think the other thing, we haven’t really talked about diversity. And diversity is important because I was very lucky working at CBR in the Middle East, we had a business of 40 odd nationalities. And of course I’m entirely biased, but I thought we had a fantastic, the best business in the region. And the reason we did that is because we had an incredibly diverse workforce. And I think unless we embrace diversity, and I don’t just mean ethnicity or gender, I mean socio-economic too, then we’re going to be lesser for it. And the other reason we’re concentrating on education at the moment is we need to take down the barriers to people who would not consider this as a profession going forward. So for those who are frustrated that they look at this profession and think that they’re not ready for it or can’t do it or can’t get in, uh, watch this space because we are trying to make the changes that will be introduced over the next couple of years or so. But some of those barriers to entry will be taken down so we can diversify the membership of the organization regardless of which market we are. And the so that’s going to be very important if we want to stay alive. We’ve got to be relevant to a larger segment of society.

Nina Young: 46:43
I think that’s a very good point to end on. The importance of diversity. It kind of all fits fits together with the mobility, age, gender. It’s just, yeah, people from all different backgrounds, the ability to feel that they can become a surveyor. Firstly, they know about it. And secondly, they can do it.

Nick Maclean: 47:04
And in order to do that properly, decentralization is going to be a key theme of RICS going forward. Because if you just look at where I’ve been in the last three weeks, uh, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, even though they’re all Southeast Asian cities or Chinese Southeast Asian cities, what the RICS and the regulators and the governments want from this institution in those markets is very different. And the difference between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, 45 minutes flying time apart, is very different. And similarly, from London to Newcastle, the requirement of the governments, the local and national in those territories is probably different. So we’ve got to rekindle this local relevance in our membership and the ability of local members to come together and talk about chew the fat over what’s happening in their local markets. And we lost that partly because of COVID and partly because of other changes that we’re going through and changing now to make us more relevant locally, but at the same time enshrining our standards. And that’s that’s quite difficult. So we want a global standard where we don’t necessarily have the authority in some markets, but we have the desire, and we’ve got to stop it being a British expat club. So we’ve got to tap into local markets, and we’ve got to stop it as is in the case in some markets where it’s seniors only. We need to make sure it’s accessible to new members of this career, and they get the benefit of all the learning and the CPD that we do going forward. So I guess all the stuff we’re lurking at is making the profession through membership of the RICS taking those barriers down, making it much more accessible than perhaps it is at the moment.

Nina Young: 48:47
Well, lots of food for thought there, Nick. It’s a lot. I bet I know it’s been keeping you busy.

Nick Maclean: 48:52
Well, it is. I’m going to be very sad on the first of January. Where are all my emails?

Nina Young: 48:57
I know. So yeah, it’s going to be quite what’s what’s for you next? What would be for you next? Have you kind of thought that or Yeah, maybe.

Nick Maclean: 49:06
Yeah. Absolutely in due course. Okay, but I’m very lucky because we we know who the next two presidents are going, Maureen from the US and Suzanne after that from Frankfurt. So we’re all, as the presidential team, we’re all aligned on what we want from this institution

Nick Maclean: 49:20
going forward. So all the stuff which is happening, we speak two or three times a week, all of us. There’s no fundamental shift in the what the presidency wants. So we we know every, and that includes the exec and the board, we know where we want to get to. So we’ve got a very good alignment of thinking going forward. So we’re all pressing for this institution to deliver what we think is important for members. And of course, we are all members. So and I think what we try and do is what would I have wanted the RICS when I was practicing at CBRE? This is what I wanted from the RICS. And that’s that’s the kind of instinct that we’re all bringing to the changes we’re trying to embark upon.

Nina Young: 50:01
I like that. You you’re basically ensuring the continuity.

Nick Maclean: 50:05
Yeah.

Nina Young: 50:05
Yeah, that’s extremely important.

Nick Maclean: 50:08
And the messaging is president from the US and the president from Germany, but we all think the same way. And that’s the continuity of the RISS, regardless of where we practice, is very important. It comes back to this concept of mobility, which is so important to our members going forward. Absolutely.

Nina Young: 50:23
Well, I really enjoyed our conversation, Nick. As always, you’re so very candid. Which is always a delight on a podcast. But uh, thank you very much for your time today.

Nick Maclean: 50:33
Thank you for inviting me.

Nina Young: 50:34
Thank you.

Nick Maclean: 50:35
All right.

Nina Young: 50:36
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