To have a job in construction, you might think you have to be good at fixing and making things but that’s just one part of it. Construction isn’t just about bricklaying, bulldozers, diggers and cranes. Within construction there are many types of services that provide excellent opportunities for well-paid, lifelong careers. What’s fantastic about construction is that it needs lots of different types of people and skills. You very probably have at least one attribute that could give you a rewarding career in construction. So, what are these careers and how would you know if it’s a fit?
When looking at the many different jobs in construction there is one word that describes the place where all these jobs are needed: infrastructure.
We can describe everything that is human-made and put on land as “infrastructure”: Roads, bridges, buildings, damns, power stations, railways, water plants and supply pipes, drainage, sewage works, gas pipes, electric cables, fibre optic broadband, and so on. That’s the big picture of infrastructure and helps you and all humanity to live your everyday life on the big scale. Without infrastructure our civilisation falls apart. Our human-made world needs you!
With large infrastructure we have everything that makes our world work. Like a good machine, infrastructure only works when everything is connected and works together. Your home links to a road, electricity, water, sewage systems, broadband. Your road connects to schools, shops, hospitals, airports. Your electricity connects to substations and different types of power stations. Your water from the tap comes from managed reservoirs many miles away and is made pure enough to drink through water treatment plants.
That’s the simplified big picture – these are the big cogs of our human-made world. But when looking at the world like this it’s difficult to see where we can fit in to find a job. It’s a vast system. Like any good machine, there are the big, obvious cogs we see, but they turn still smaller cogs that makes stuff happen at a more detailed level.
To see these smaller cogs we need to zoom in and look at what makes everything we know work. This is where it’s possible to begin to see many jobs where you can fit in and make a difference to the world, contributing to our civilisation’s human-made infrastructure.
As we zoom in to this big human-made world of infrastructure, we start to see how the big stuff works. Its massive scale is dazzling, and what you find and see depends on where you look.
Whenever a structure or building is being built or re-fitted, there are many jobs created. Where might you fit in?
Out of everything humans have created, there is a job waiting to fit you like a glove. As we start to zoom in we see all the big stuff get closer… bridges, roads, damns, power stations… but let’s look around something specific in more detail, magnifying the structure of a large building in a city.
Buildings are common parts of our infrastructure and therefore offer huge opportunities in business. Like any building, it’s made of walls and a roof. But what else? Zooming into our large building we start to see something known in the construction industry as “building services”. What are these services and how is it relevant to finding a job?
Once a building has been constructed, with walls, ceilings, floors and stairs you are looking at a structure with nothing in it. The building needs bringing to life, giving its occupants comfort, making it functional, ensuring it’s efficient and a safe place to be. There’s still no water, no electricity, no heating, no air conditioning, and no communications. These things not only need to connect to the building, but they also need to be distributed and managed through it. For example, the power of the main electrical current coming into a building needs to be split out appropriately and distributed through different cable thicknesses to reach and sufficiently power all the many needs, such as lighting, fire alarms, office computers, ventilation units, boilers and so on. Each one has a different power requirement that needs calculating and needs adequate cabling to power it. This is the essence of what we call “building services” that serves a building’s infrastructure for people that inhabit buildings for various purposes.
With the big picture explained, here we are at this Zoomed in setting, focussed on Building Services, which can be summed up as being the electrical, plumbing and mechanical systems designed and installed in a building. The purpose of this booklet is to explain the career opportunities there are in Building Services and explain what might suit your skills and interests, and what you need to know to get into a career. The good news is that the construction industry embraces people of all backgrounds, ages and different levels of education and is passionate to help them progress their careers from school leaver to secure retirement. There’s more good news too:
It’s time to go a little deeper into Building Services, zooming one last time into the detail, which will help guide you to a career that could suit you perfectly in M&E Building Services.
There are different types of Building Services available. So, you may be asking, what is M&E in building services? The answer is “Mechanical & Electrical”. It can also be known as MEP, which is “Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing”. Let’s look at the different types of M&E services, and don’t worry if you have no idea what some of these are:
Ventilation Systems
Refrigerant
Heating & Cooling Systems
Air Source Heatpumps
Ground Source Heatpumps
Boiler Systems
Chiller Systems
Domestic Services
Piped Services
Electrical Installations
Data Infrastructure
Lighting Control Systems
Fire Alarm Systems
Public Address Voice Address Systems (PAVA)
Building Management Systems (BMS)
Photovoltaic Systems (PV)
Electric Vehicle Charging (EV)
