It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Graham Edward, Managing Director of Edward Architecture.
Our experience of the property sector looking forward to 2022 remains buoyant and will hopefully remain so whilst bank rates remain low. A recent RIBA study has found that UK based Architecture workload remains steady in key sectors like infrastructure, residential and logistics.
At Edward Architecture we have a solid and exciting order book for the next 18 months. The industry is, however, having to work through supply issues in construction, materials, consultancy, legals and the planning system, which will hopefully ease as we cope with some industry inertia brought about by Brexit and Covid.
To be resilient to this continued workload and retain capacity, consultancies like ourselves are working hard to both retain staff and train new blood. I think the lockdown has let down a generation of graduates, by a reluctance to employ and too much remote working.
We have invested in staff training and have taken on more graduates and try to give them good office exposure. Consultancies like ourselves have also introduced flexi time and hybrid office / home working to give an optimum work life balance and a good learning environment.
Another evolution as we go into the new year is digitalisation. Clients and consumers have a heightened expectation for the digital experience, much more design is BIM based and led by ‘golden thread’ central information software products such as Operance, which collates all design and build information right through to a built package stage.
