What is the difference between a Senior Quantity Surveyor and a Quantity Surveyor? 🧐 This may sound like a daft question, however, when speaking to clients, the clear differences are becoming a grey area due to overworked teams and fast-track promotions. What do you think are some clear differences in the roles in relation to responsibilities?
Stuart M.
3mo
The ability to manage both yourself and a wider commercial team whether trainees, AQS or QS. If a client can’t differentiate them when making promotions then that’s a concern and I would question their structure
John O'Hare
3mo
Difficulties are caused by promoting based on requirements to achieve salary and benefits rather than by experience and knowledge. In house building we have a significant number of workers who have missed out on major elements of their job and still gained promotion. Based on shortages and poor management from above.
Adam McComb
3mo
It's becoming a common theme I've noticed recently... Senior QS' with 3 years experience. Likely the fast track promotion as you've mentioned above Matthew Williams. But I would say Stuart is absolutely spot on.
Key things: Be able to manage a project from start to finish with little supervision from above, even unaided depending on structure. Strategy thinking which only comes with experience.....think of the bigger picture, future relationships and so on. People manage, be able to manage more junior/less experienced staff. Job titles can mean little though, I have worked with really good QSs that will become stars of the future and also commercial managers who are poor.
You know this a common question I’ve seen about for the last few months and it’s good it gets highlighted because it does seem so many people have different thoughts on what a SQS should be. I feel like a SQS role can vary quite abit dependent on what the specific companies require. Which I personally I feel is slightly wrong because if your requiring a senior QS to manage people , then his role would be MQS or CM. However I’ve seen a few trends now with companies pushing the senior QS to train employees , as well as manage several projects from start to finish. For me a senior quantity surveyor should be able to manage larger contracts from start to finish, including communicating and liasing with the client and reporting cvrs/forecast to the mqs/cm. Not also fall into the line of managing others , otherwise would they not of applied for an MQS role instead? How I see it a quantity surveyor like myself, I would be responsible for smaller orders /drafting larger orders with final check off by the MQS, liasing with subcontractors to ensure things on the ground are running smoothly/ drafting and sending AFP to the subcontractors (dependant on value)/ building the AFP for the client (with overall final check of the MQS) etc
Lee Bell
3mo
About £10k ?
rob clark
3mo
Few thousand a year more and maybe a extra day or two holiday
Freelance Senior QS Engineering
3moA Senior QS is NOT a manager! So many on here stating that they are. Manager is not in the job title. A SQS should be able to operate projects more or less independently, understand clients and the nature of the relationship, probably have extra skills in estimating and reporting and will mentor others. If a SQS role has management, that's a Commercial Manager and has a higher rate attached.