Dinner 4 - Manchester

Nobody owns the standard, so the room built one: inside CLIC's fourth dinner

Most industry dinners end with a good conversation and nothing to show for it. CLIC's fourth dinner set out to end with a blueprint. Around the table at Malmaison Piccadilly in Manchester in February 2026, sixteen commercial leaders — from rail, utilities, civils, fire safety and fit-out — spent the evening trying to build something the profession has never quite agreed on: a competency matrix for Quantity Surveyors.

What is a QS actually meant to be able to do?

The first question was what such a matrix is even for. Is it a personal development pathway, or a recruitment and benchmarking tool? The room's answer was that it has to be both — a map that runs from trainee QS to commercial director, useful to someone planning a career and to someone trying to hire fairly against it.

The practical design took shape quickly. Build adaptable role profiles from a common baseline. Layer sector-specific competencies on top, because utilities, civils, rail, fire and interiors each demand a different technical and commercial profile. Introduce a sliding scale, and lighter-touch versions for operational and administrative staff rather than forcing one heavy framework on everyone. The tension the room accepted was that every firm will always tailor a matrix to its own work — but that there's genuine value in a shared baseline to benchmark against, which nobody currently provides.

Is RICS still the gold standard — or just the reputation of one?

RICS was respected in the room as a detailed baseline and, importantly, as the credential that still gives clients confidence. But it drew real criticism for being too broad and too disconnected from day-to-day pressures, and too generic for smaller and niche sectors to lean on without heavy tailoring.

The more pointed question was whether the "gold standard" has been diluted by changes to the qualification routes — whether RICS remains the genuine benchmark or whether its reputation now runs ahead of the reality. It was a debate the room clearly wanted to keep having, and one that fed directly into why a shared, sector-aware competency tool felt worth building.

Who is going to sign the next generation off?

Mentorship surfaced as the bottleneck behind everything else. There aren't enough qualified mentors to sign candidates off, and the firms that have them can't spare the time. A structural conflict was aired plainly: universities have a financial incentive to pass people, which sits awkwardly against a mentor's honest assessment of whether someone is actually ready to run a job.

The proposed fixes were characteristically practical: train more people to mentor and sign off, so the pool widens; lean on peer-to-peer and cross-sector mentoring rather than waiting for the perfect in-house mentor; and feed candid readiness feedback back to the universities. One member committed to keep training toward sign-off, and to tell the universities the truth about where graduates land.

Quality and quantity, at the same time

The evening's hardest problem was that the industry faces two shortages at once: not enough QSs, and inconsistent quality among the ones it has. Talent scarcity is driving title inflation and role dilution, particularly at Assistant QS level, where the same title can mean very different pay and very different skills. Too often, the room felt, junior staff follow the procedure without understanding the commercial risk sitting behind it — administrative compliance where the job actually needs commercial judgement.

A tool, not just a talk

What separated the fourth dinner was that people left with work to do. Members agreed to progress the competency matrix as the network's flagship deliverable, to build a shared resource vault of templates and competency documents, and to circulate a draft framework for the whole group to mark up. On funding the network's ambitions, the room was cautious in a telling way — open to sponsors who add genuine value, wary of anyone whose interests might chill the candour, and clear that legal firms were off the table on conflict grounds. The point of the evening wasn't to admire the problem. It was to start fixing it.

CLIC is an invitation-only network for senior commercial leaders in UK construction and infrastructure. Dinners operate under Chatham House Rules. If you lead a commercial function and want a seat at the table, apply through the site.