Job spotlight: Steve Payne – balancing different skills

The director of Steve Payne Consultants explains how he combines
construction consultancy work with academic responsibilities.

You combine consultancy with academic tasks. Describe a typical day.

A typical day consists of balancing the needs of both. The
consultancy work is very varied and primarily covers business processes and
improvement in project, programme and portfolio environments. Risk management
against time quality and cost is also a big part.

The academic aspect draws on my university-level teaching
qualification to deliver courses and professional qualifications accredited
with a range of professional bodies.

My day can vary from providing professional review mentoring
and marking for MCIOB status, and the professional review for the Association
for Project Management Chartered Project Professional (APM ChPP) status, to
delivering courses.

What qualifications and experience have you needed to balance these twin skills?

Having started as a self-employed carpenter and then working through site management, contracts management, and on to lead regional businesses for several of the major PLC construction companies, I have gained a unique perspective of the industry which prepares me well for the challenges of consultancy.

Nothing prepares you better than actually having done it, or experienced it. The status of FCIOB has without doubt been a significant aspect of being regarded as an expert in this field.

To be regarded as a consultant I think it is necessary to
have both experience and academic qualifications and this prompted me to take a
master’s degree in Construction Management in 2000, and a Postgraduate
Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE) in 2012.

What are the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your job?

One of the main challenges is balancing the workload between
training and consultancy to make the business as agile as possible and adapting
to changing markets.

The covid situation has made us look at other options for
course delivery and we now also provide all our training as an online option of
blended learning (a mix of e-learning, virtual classroom, and one-to-one
mentoring).

The main reward I get is the satisfaction of our candidates
on courses achieving their aspirations. Particularly when we have trained and
then mentored construction professionals through the CIOB process to achieve
MCIOB. I also get great satisfaction from seeing businesses improve their
performance as a result of our intervention and support.