Becoming a young Chartered Member of the Institute has made me conscious of my commitment to maintaining and presenting a good corporate image with my colleagues and Consultant-Clients according to the professional ethics rules and regulations specified by CIOB. 

Whenever attending client discussions and team meetings I take care to minute them accordingly and share my thoughts and ideas politely and constructively. 

I also think it is very important to maintain a proper work-life balance inside the construction environment - I find it gives me a kind of psychological advantage to work with a more focused approach.  As a non-native member of the society, I believe this attitude, which requires commitment, dedication and a will to serve the best to your clients has also driven me to achieve chartered membership in a relatively short period of time. 

Through MCIOB I’ve learned so much more about key issues like the Health & Safety Environment (HSE), Sustainability, Quality Control & Assurance (QA/QC) from an engineering perspective.  All these components were included as modules in PDP training and I was lucky enough to train myself outside of my job role. As construction professionals we should all understand the value both of HSE and of maintaining a sustainable environment to the public. 

Like so many organisations in our industry, in my current project, our organization is very conscious of maintaining appropriate HSE standards and regulations to control unnecessary accidents and to provide safer environment for the adjacent neighbourhood.  

Learning about sustainability has been a real eye opener for me.  Our project is under the approval of the Building Construction Authority, Singapore and is on track to obtain a GOLD certificate from Green Mark which is very similar to the international standards BREEAM(UK) and LEED which are all voluntary assessment approaches used to describe new and existing buildings’ social, economic and environmental performance. The assessment works by giving a building a score based on its performance against a series of set criteria. There are two assessment stages: a design stage assessment that leads to a provisional rating followed by a post construction assessment leading to the final rating. 

I’ve had a great opportunity to learn about how things work in terms of sustainable features and what measures need to be taken to achieve specified standards working closely with our appointed Sustainable Consultant from Singapore, keeping in touch over Skype for discussions. 

I think it’s really important for construction managers to have sound knowledge on Sustainability, which means to set an industry-wide standard for ecological transparency.  Its set to be a game changer, not just for strategy, but also for people decisions. I think ecological transparency in the marketplace propels sustainability leadership to the centre of strategic planning.

For my ongoing CPD, I attend locally organized sessions here in Brunei as well as attending webinars and doing online CPDs from Constructionmanager.co.uk. I find so many of the relevant topics interesting and I’m never hesitant to try other general CPDs too! It won’t come as a surprise that topics related to HSE and Sustainability as well as BIM always appeal me; and I’m really interested in learning more about management of above mentioned practices, which I believe would really help me in the future. 

In the short term I’m working towards becoming MAIQS (Member of Australian Quantity Surveyor) My ultimate goal, however, is to obtain FCIOB and serve the CIOB academically. 

And for my next QS quest? I’ll decide my next destination depending on how the current project goes…. I'm so grateful to my parents, friends, University and CIOB for supporting me this far. And I’m looking forward to the next chapter. 

Signing off from Brunei.