The Skills Needed for a Better Built Environment

Very few people know that the popular saying, “a Jack of all trades, master of none”, has actually been abbreviated in popular culture, and the original quote once read, “a Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Throughout my career, I have had the pleasure of working with exceptional specialists, from arboriculturists to anthropologists, and in sharing this full quote, it is not my intention to pit the so-called generalists or specialists against one another. Instead, what I would like to illustrate, and what I chose to speak about at the NLA Next Gen conference, Finding Your Place, is how public perception and perhaps a little prejudice regarding the role of generalists have shaped this quote and dominated this debate for a long time. I’m excited to think that times are shifting because I strongly believe we need many different skill types to tackle trending and complex global challenges.

The discussion of supporting NextGen talent to find their place in the sector is a debate I am personally passionate about as someone who has taken a more unconventional route into Real Estate, having studied an interdisciplinary degree at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and having worked in the public and third sectors for several years before joining Montagu Evans’ Strategic Advisory Team.

Strategic Advisory was born at Montagu Evans to recognise that our clients increasingly require consultants with cross-disciplinary backgrounds to tackle complex problem-solving. I joined Strategic Advisory from Hackney Council, where I worked in Area Regeneration. Over the last year, I have been using my unconventional route into real estate to develop and define our social impact consultancy at Montagu Evans, which, for me, is all about creating better development and real estate solutions for society. A key challenge today across the ESG landscape is the continuously shifting use of policy, vocabulary, expectations, and best practices, and I have found that coordinating a holistic strategy, from vision through to delivery, requires a broad knowledge base to speak different languages across public and private sector partners, as well as being able to recognise, and pull-on various levers of change.

My career path has shown me that forging new paths and bringing people along requires a certain level of generalism. However, I believe that this, in itself, is a specialisation. I would now proudly consider myself a specialist generalist.

At the conference, I also wore my hat as co-Chair of the Real Estate Balance Next Gen Committee. Speaking with my Co-Chairs about the debate, it became clear that celebrating the full range of future roles needed across the sector is critical to realising change. Our Real Estate Balance 2023 Next Gen survey clearly illustrated that Real Estate is still considered a ‘secret’ sector, difficult to access socially and economically. Survey respondents reported that widening access and removing barriers to entry into real estate could be achieved through a combination of school talks, general awareness-raising by companies working collaboratively to promote careers and routes into the industry, and the provision of various entry points for school leavers.

As part of this outreach, let us also proudly advocate for less traditional routes into the industry and empower those seeking to be problem solvers as specialists, generalists, or specialist generalists!