n Committee remodelling

COMMITTEE REMODELLING

BERNADETTE MORRISSEY WAS ELECTED CHAIR OF SCSI NEXUS IN 2020, AND TALKS ABOUT HER WORK WITH THE COMMITTEE AND HER OWN PROFESSIONAL CAREER.

Bernadette’s eye fell on surveying after originally doing a degree in commerce. Following a master’s in quantity surveying in the UK, she started working in London for J. Murphy and

Sons in the company’s tunnels division, which involved working on the Crossrail project’s C310 tunnel, an extension to a London Underground tunnel.

Since moving home, she has worked for PJ

Hegarty and Sons and says a typical workday involves interacting with the site team: “The project managers, the engineers, interacting with the client team, again quantity surveyors, engineers, project managers. I would spend a good amount of my time dealing with subcontractors”.

SCSI Nexus

Bernadette served as Chair of SCSI Nexus from August 2020 to June 2021. Formerly known as the YSCSI, the committee changed its name to better reflect the cohort of people entering surveying. Having originally trained in another field, Bernadette knows that new surveyors do not all come into the profession at 21 or 22 years of age: “Typically, what you find a lot with surveying is that people might get into it as a secondary career choice. They might have started out doing something else and then moved into surveying. Professionals at the early stage of their career might not be young. From a within the profession point of view, we feel the Nexus committee is the stepping stone for professionals at the early stages of their career into the SCSI”. The committee is known for holding many social events. Although these could not take place during the pandemic, Bernadette and Nexus have kept themselves busy: “We contribute to SCSI initiatives, such as our mental health awareness survey. We’re going to be starting a surveyors’ competition called Innovation for our Future in the summer. We are in the process of developing a Transition Year booklet to encourage secondary school students to take up surveying as a profession. Within that we are trying to promote equality and diversity by publishing photos of male and female surveyors doing their day-to-day work”. The work of Bernadette and Nexus has been more formal during this period, but no less important: “It has been a very different year for the committee in that we’ve focused on more paper-based SCSI contributions, which has been a positive thing for the committee, in that our reputation now extends beyond social activities and we hope that we’re able to contribute to the SCSI in a more formal way, as well as getting back to social activities when normality resumes”.

SURVEYOR PROFILE

Colm Quinn Journalist and Sub-Editor, Think Media Bernadette Morrissey originally completed a degree in commerce before pursuing a career as a quantity surveyor.

Equality

Bernadette would like to see Nexus continue and do more in its work in encouraging students into surveying, especially women: “We have an active part to play in speaking to schools and representing ourselves at events that will encourage teenagers and kids to see that surveying is a profession they might be interested in. I like to think myself that if you can see it, you can be it, so particularly from a young female perspective, I’d be very passionate about equality and diversity, and encouraging more females into the industry”. Bernadette has plans to engage different kinds of media to show women in the surveying workplace: “Hopefully in the future, we can put some short videos together to give a snapshot of say, Bernie who’s a QS, or Susan who’s a property surveyor, or Jennifer who’s a building surveyor”.