Hello. I’m Vipattz Ratnarajah MCIOB.  I’m a Native Sri Lankan currently working as a Quantity Surveyor in Brunei Darussalam, a small sovereign state located on the north coast of the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia. I was awarded chartered membership from the CIOB in July 2016.

I enjoy working in construction very much and want others to know what an interesting and varied industry it is to work.  Something I hear a lot is that many people – especially younger people – don’t know much about our industry beyond a typical image of a man in a hard hat on a muddy building site.  The industry does involve hats and there can be mud, but there’s so much more to it! 

I want to challenge that muddy image by sharing my own experience of this fascinating industry, so this is the first in a series of blogs I’ll be writing for the CIOB where I’ll be talking about how I came into the sector, where I live and what I do in construction as a Quantity Surveyor, or QS. 

I hope this will give a tiny flavour of the many types of roles that can be done in construction all over the world, especially with the MCIOB certification – and show that you don’t have to get muddy if you don’t want to! 

Look out or my next blog post where I’ll be talking about my inspiration for construction and how I ended up working in Brunei.