Hosted by Visiting Professor at UCL, Ian Durbin, IEDE Talks 2025 brings senior industry leaders from the UK-built environment design community to discuss the opportunities and challenges of tomorrow’s careers in the Built Environment with senior industry leaders and introduce various career pathways to the students after graduation. Guests answer questions about real-world challenges and provide guidance for securing employment, and what one needs to be great at that will be measured when they step into that role.
James Ford, Director at Hoare Lea Advisory & Advocacy Business Unit and Product and Innovation Lead, was the guest for this talk. James has around 25 years of experience, starting as a building services engineer, through sustainability to senior leadership. As a senior leader at Hoare Lea, James is personally committed to transforming the built environment response to the climate crisis. In his role with the Product and innovation teams, he activates and empowers innovation and problem-solving across Hoare Lea, its global parent company Tetra Tech, and the industry to move beyond what we think is possible.
In this talk, James introduced the evolution of Hoare Lea from MEP services consultancy into an engineering team of problem solvers and curators of human experiences. James’s key advice to the students was to aim for excellence by doing what you can do well. He emphasised that understating more than one discipline of building environment and construction industry leads to transferable skills and is the key to success in future built environment careers.
Watch the recording of the careers talk on The Bartlett Youtube channel:
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