“I wanted some letters after my name”

Career paths rarely follow an arrow-straight course. 

When Lee Long CMgr MCMI was at school, he discovered a love of computers and other tech, but when he tried studying programming, he found it “boring”. He pivoted to studying business and finance at HND level, only to experience the same thing there. His eventual career – he’s now senior project manager at construction group John Sisk & Son – began with what he calls a “happy accident”. 

“I was delivering milk to an opencast coal site, and saw they were looking for an apprentice civil engineer,” says Lee. “I packed in my HND halfway through and joined them to train on the job.”

Lee was soon moving up the ladder and naturally found his way to management. 

“I’d see the way things were done and think I could do it better,” he says. “Or I’d have a way of doing things that I wanted to try out. That pushed me up through the ranks.”

Project self-development

When he was 27, Lee wanted to solidify his management knowledge, all of which he’d picked up on the job. He chose a construction management degree at Sheffield Hallam University, where he learned important concepts like the time-cost-quality triangle and the fundamentals of contract and commercial management. Upon graduation, a stint as a site manager led him to project management and leading his own team. 

These days, he’s managing projects worth upwards of £30m. The last two – cycle lane-related works in the city centres of Leeds and Sheffield – have tapped directly into his drive to advocate for green innovations and policies. 

• More green management: “As a manager, I’ll never stop learning”

Lee is now leading his third full project with Sisk: a £38m project to build new flood defences in Derby, designed to protect the city centre for the next 80 years.

Dialing down

That’s a huge amount of lived management experience, given it all stemmed from a milk round. 

Yet Lee still felt something was missing. In 2022, he embarked on a year-long Level 6 Professional Management and Leadership Practice course and secured Chartered Manager status. He was partly motivated to test his learning. But he had another reason for pursuing Chartered status.