George Hood, the North Scotland managing director for construction and civil engineering giant Balfour Beatty, is retiring after a 40 year career in the industry.
Recently, the Aberdeen-based boss oversaw the completion of the £22.3million Third Don Crossing.
This is in contrast to his first job as a 19-year old trainee quantity surveyor in 1975 where he was paid the princely salary of £1,301. He remained through several incarnations of the same firm which started as Alexander Hall, then became Hall & Tawse, and later still was bought by Mansell, the Scottish construction firm that ended up in Balfour Beatty’s ranks in 2003.
When he started, business was “booming”, he said.
“We were putting up lots of multi-storey flats for the council.”
Even before the discovery of oil in the North Sea, construction was thriving, building bonded warehouses for the whisky industry, which employed more than 23,000 people directly in the 1970s.
Then the oil boom hit Aberdeen in 1979, triggering another construction frenzy.
“All of a sudden Aberdeen was flooded with Yanks – high rollers. We were busy busy, building all the sort of stuff you would get in a frontier-style town,” said Mr Hood.
Office blocks and hotels went up for the oil industry executives and workers, followed by a boom in pubs, nightclubs and restaurants.
Within eight years of starting in the industry, Mr Hood was project surveyor on a number of large Aberdeen office developments that would transform the city, including at the Hill of Rubislaw for ConocoPhilips, Marathon Oil and Britoil.
He would later also project manage the Bon Accord shopping centre and oversaw the demolition of George Street.
One of the ironies of his career was building a hospitality suite at Ibrox Stadium, despite being a life-long Celtic fan.
He also landed the framework contract for work at RAF Lossiemouth for many years, constructing hangars for the Eurofighter Typhoons based there.
Mr Hood observed how different things were in the old days.
“Directors were always ‘mister’…they were never called by their first name. That formality has long since disappeared. Also, the boardroom lunches. There was wine, whisky, cigars – that’s how business was done,” he recalled.
Construction now suffers from a deep skills crisis and increasingly has had to rely on foreign workers. Mr Hood says that it would now be impossible to complete a large-scale infrastructure project without bringing in overseas workers, many from Eastern Europe.
“It’s hard to attract people into the trades in our industry now. Perhaps it’s for the same reason we don’t have a good footie team. The kids don’t want to do physical work. They’re happier to sit behind a computer,” he says.
But Mr Hood and Balfour Beatty are working hard to reverse misperceptions of the industry. “Kids need to be inspired and encouraged and that’s what we are doing by giving them work experience and working with local school pupils to generate their interest,” Mr Hood said.
“You have to recruit for attitude and train for skills,” Mr Hood added.
As for Hood, he will be putting his ideas on flexible working to the test as he continues to work a few days a week on a consultancy basis. Aside from his on-going work with Balfour Beatty, Mr Hood is aiming to support Balfour Beatty’s 5% Club commitments by mentoring new trainees setting out on their career paths.
