The Real Impact of Construction — Healthcare, Hospitals, and Purpose

Jack Chalkley joins The Engineer a Career Podcast to share what a career in construction actually looks like from the inside and how a project director gets built one project at a time.Jack is a Project Director and Scotland Healthcare Lead at AECOM, where he leads multidisciplinary delivery across some of the country's most complex social infrastructure projects. His route in wasn't planned, a builder sketching extension drawings on his parents' kitchen table sparked an interest in architecture, which became construction management at GCU, which became a trainee role at Clark Contracts running his own projects before he'd even graduated. Fifty projects later, he moved to AECOM and progressed from Project Manager to Project Director in under five years.In this episode, we explore what it really means to build a career in construction why placements change everything, how contracting sets you up for consultancy, and what it takes to lead client conversations when you're decades younger than the people in the room. We talk about the Golden Jubilee surgical centre and why healthcare projects keep him passionate, the mentors who shaped his progression, and why "be a sponge" is still his core advice years into the job. We also get into the contractor-to-consultancy shift, what good project management actually looks like, and why there's no single path through this industry.This is an honest conversation for students and early career engineers wondering what construction careers really involve and how far you can go when you stop worrying about your age and start owning the work.

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