This one is dedicated to all the trainees, apprentices, undergraduates and graduates just starting out in the construction and property sectors. It's probably most useful to white collar professionals on the consultancy side, but there's value here for individuals across the industry.

Having done this job for 20 years, spoken to literally thousands of professionals and reviewed thousands of CVs, I've seen individuals accelerate their careers by starting correctly. Sadly, I've also seen careers stall because of the wrong decisions made early on. Here's how to make sure you're in the first group.

Get Immersed From Day One

Most people I know who've been very successful in this industry got immersed in it and genuinely loved it from day one. They read and consume industry news, attend relevant talks and lectures, work through textbooks, listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos on the subject. They seek to become an expert early. Do the same.

Do As Well As You Can Academically

An obvious one, but it matters. While the industry generally has staffing shortages, the very best businesses with the best training programmes don't struggle for applicants at trainee and graduate level. The difference between a 2:1 and a 2:2 may be the difference between getting past the initial sift or not. Push yourself for a first or a 2:1, even if it makes your student years a little less fun. You're likely incurring a lot of debt to get that qualification; it would be a shame for it to hold you back from the start.

It's Never Too Early to Start Networking

Look at the leaders of the industry today and you'll find strong professional networks that often began in their student days or very early careers. Make the most of every networking opportunity: university events, junior level events run by the likes of the RICS, CIOB and RIBA, anything you can get to. Meet people beyond your own discipline too.

Once you're inside a business, get involved in internal workshops, working groups and networking events. Senior people, CEOs, directors, partners, often turn up at these, and they're people you'd never otherwise get exposure to day to day. If you can gain an internal sponsor early in your career because they've met you at such an event and rate your enthusiasm, it can genuinely accelerate your progress.

Choose the Right Graduate Programme

There's a real range of quality in trainee and graduate programmes out there. Things to look for:

Rotation. Does the business rotate you across different teams and projects? Many good businesses run something like six month rotations across your first two years, giving you a genuinely broad range of experience.

Technology. Is the business investing in technology and supporting trainees and graduates to get up to speed with it? The industry, and the world, is changing at a rapid pace, and some businesses are miles behind others.

Do your research. Go to careers fairs, ask lots of questions, and read the graduate pages on company websites in depth so you can prioritise the companies you genuinely want to work for. The same applies to your year out placement; most people who do a year out end up being offered a position by the same company, so the research is worth doing even before you graduate.

Then commit real time to the application process. Don't copy and paste the same words into a hundred applications. Identify your top ten companies and put in proper, detailed applications. Have friends and family review them, and ideally somebody already in the industry. You may be competing with hundreds of people for tens of positions, so the effort is worth it.

And when you get the interview, nail it. You can do everything else right and then have a train crash of an interview. Practise. Get friends and family to run mock interviews, or better still, someone in the industry or in a management position used to recruiting at graduate level. Ask them to give you a genuinely tough interview so you're mentally prepared for the real thing.

The Biggest Piece of Advice: Do Not Chase the Money

If you take one thing from this article, take this. You have a full career ahead of you. Pick the best organisation to start it in, even if they're not paying the most.

A really good trainee programme, a good mentor who'll look after you, and support in gaining your professional membership as quickly as possible: that is worth its weight in gold. Compare that with an organisation paying you two, three or five grand more than your peers but with poor training. I guarantee you, the individual who joins the right programme with the right support will overtake and accelerate past the person who started on more money without the right grounding.

Get Your Professional Membership as Soon as Possible

Whatever discipline you're in, there will be professional membership qualifications you need to be considered a true professional, particularly on the consultancy side. For quantity surveyors and building surveyors that's MRICS, and increasingly for project managers too, though MAPM and MCIOB are also very applicable.

I get it: you may have already spent years studying and be thoroughly fed up with working evenings and weekends. And yes, professional membership takes exactly that kind of commitment. But I can assure you, life only gets more complicated as it plods on, whether through busier work schedules as you progress or through starting a family. Right now you're in a unique position: you have the time, the energy and the headspace. Get it done.

That qualification will open doors internally and externally. In certain businesses you'll hit a glass ceiling without it. If you ever want to work internationally, it makes that far easier too. The sooner it's out of the way, the sooner your career accelerates.

Learn to Manage Your Own Projects Early

I completely understand the prestige of working on a major headline project, the kind that's in the press and wins industry awards. But being a very small cog in a big machine will not serve you early in your career.

Telling your mum and dad you're working on a massive scheme sounds better than saying you're fitting out a new Costa Coffee. But the small fit out that's yours will give you far better fundamentals. You'll be there from feasibility, you'll tussle with contracting teams, you'll get involved in design, and you'll face a range of issues and complexities you have to overcome yourself. It will accelerate your learning dramatically compared with playing a bit part on something enormous.

The very best businesses give you both: experience on a large project as part of a rotation, plus your own projects to manage. From there you scale up to bigger and bigger schemes. The person who does this will be in a far better place than someone who spent their first two to five years stuck on one major project.

The Right Mentor Is Worth Their Weight in Gold

A genuinely good boss or line manager, someone who supports you, pushes you hard, and shares the wisdom of their 20 or 30 years of experience, someone who truly has your best interests at heart and wants you to succeed, is invaluable. That person is worth sticking around for during the first two or three years of your career.

That said, you can outgrow a mentor, a team or a business. Don't let your career plateau because you love your boss and you're a bit too attached. If you've stopped advancing, it may be time to move on, and trust me, the best mentors will see that themselves and will be the ones pushing you to go.

Should You Move Jobs?

Pull all of the above together and the ideal picture looks like this: you join a business that gives you great initial training with rotations, exposes you to the latest technology, actively encourages you towards your professional membership, identifies projects you can run on your own, and gives you a good mentor. If you've got all of that, I see no reason whatsoever to move. Let them invest in you, complete your academic qualifications, and ideally get your professional membership, becoming MRICS for example, before considering a move.

But what if you made your choice, did all your due diligence, and you're just not getting any of it? You're stuck on that major project, there's no support with your professional membership, and you're fed up. First, if the fundamentals of the business seem sound, raise your concerns. It may just be a case of moving team or project to get back on track. If not, then sadly it may be time to consider moving company.

If you do, you'll need a CV. Early in your career, with limited project experience, concentrate on your academic experience, skills, hobbies and achievements, whether sport, music or anything else. If you do have project experience, focus on those projects, your involvement, and what you learned. Keep it under two pages, keep it clean, avoid tables and fancy fonts. Keep it simple.

When Should You Engage a Recruiter?

Candidly, and I say this as a recruiter, most recruiters are not much use to you early in your career. Most decent businesses of any size already have active graduate programmes and relationships with universities and apprenticeship providers. They simply don't need to pay a recruitment fee for trainee and graduate level hires. On top of that, if your employer is funding your studies, you may have signed a clawback agreement requiring repayment if you leave within a set period, which makes it even harder for a new employer to take you on and pay a fee as well. At this stage, apply to graduate programmes directly, or use contacts you already have, perhaps someone you went to university with.

The time to engage a recruiter is roughly two years post academic qualification, when you're on the cusp of your first professional membership, say six months out from your APC. That's when the services of someone like me really kick in: market knowledge, and guidance on which companies are worth looking at and which are worth avoiding.

Good Luck

You've joined an industry that's going from strength to strength, with significant skill shortages that create genuine opportunity for rapid progression, provided you make the right choices early on. Start right, and the rest of your career will thank you for it.