A career as a construction design manager involves coordinating and organising design work across all aspects of a construction or civil engineering project. So let’s have a look at what your career as a design manager actually involves and where your career as a design manager can take you.
Working as a Construction Design Manager
A career as a design manager within the construction industry will involve you working across multiple aspects of the project, and liaising with many other different roles and trades. Just some of your responsibilities would be:
- Organising, coordinating and leading project meetings
- Liaising with site management, contractors and project stakeholders
- Ensuring that clients design requirements are met
- Ensuring that design related material is available to those who need it when they need it
- Staying up to date with codes of practice and legislation in relation to compliance procedures
- Having a good knowledge of any regulatory, commercial and technical issues and how they can impact design concerns
- Communicating any issues to relevant personnel to ensure they can be resolved swiftly.
Career Path
Your construction design manager will involve a lot of communication between various departments and stakeholders on the project. Just some of the other roles and trades you could expect to work alongside in your career as a design manager include:
- Site manager
- Architect
- Civil engineer
- Structural engineer
- Land surveyor
- Documents controller
- QA/QS engineer
- BIM Manager
- CAD technician
- Project engineer
- Geotech engineer
- Design engineer
- Estimator
- Purchaser
Professional Qualifications
In order to start your career as a design manager you will need third level qualifications and most likely a postgraduate qualification or Masters in areas such as building studies, building engineering or building management.
Design managers will be expected to undergo significant CPD, further education is a must for your career in construction design management, as is establishing and constantly expanding a strong professional network.
How your Career can Develop
Initially you will need to study hard to earn the proper qualifications that can put you on the path to working on the sorts of projects that best suit your skills. Once you have established yourself by working on successful projects you can take on increased responsibility on larger scale projects, including supervisory or management roles. Design management can ultimately work on very large scale projects, both in Ireland and overseas and it’s a particularly interesting, challenging and rewarding career if you are interested in the design, the built environment, climate change, project management and people management.