Pascal Patrice
I’ve spent 25 years in heavy civil construction, most of them running projects. This summer I decided to stop relying on my own impressions of what’s happening to this job and start counting. Since July, I’ve been running a short anonymous survey of construction project managers — no company behind it, no sales angle, just questions about how the work has changed.
Fifty-three PMs have answered so far, from one-truck outfits to companies with more than 500 employees. On most questions, opinions spread out the way you’d expect. On one, they don’t.
Fifty-three out of 53 say that finding competent, experienced people on site has become harder over the last few years. Not one exception. Seventy-seven percent say “a lot harder.” In twenty-five years of jobsite conversations, I have never heard this industry agree unanimously on anything — not on contracts, not on schedules, certainly not on whose fault the delay was. But on this, complete agreement.
The rest of the early numbers sketch out why the job feels the way it does. Eighty-five percent say the job is harder than five years ago. Ninety-six percent say paperwork has increased. More than half — 55 percent — now spend over half their week on administration and reporting rather than on the site running the work they were hired to run. One respondent put it plainly: “too many different platforms… doing things three different places.” Another: budgets and schedules are “developed based on best-case scenarios” — and then reality invoices the difference.
And here’s the number that should worry every owner and executive reading this: 64 percent of project managers say they learn about cost overruns too late to do anything about them. Not too late to explain them — too late to act. Only a quarter of respondents work with any dedicated cost-tracking tool; the rest are on spreadsheets, accounting software, or “a mix.” The information exists on every jobsite, every day. It just arrives at the desk after the money is spent.
You might expect all this to add up to an exodus. It doesn’t. Seventy-seven percent of these same PMs say they would choose this career again. That’s the finding I keep coming back to: this is not a story about people who hate their job. It’s a story about experienced people who love the work watching it get buried under everything that isn’t the work.
One honest caveat about the sample: so far it leans toward Quebec, and toward senior people — half the respondents have more than 15 years in the role. That’s exactly why I’m writing this here. If you manage construction projects in Ontario — or anywhere in Canada — I want your numbers in this dataset, especially if you’re earlier in your career. The survey is anonymous, takes about two minutes, and is available in English and French:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe2RRf7bCnZ4_Iy953O48vAFYw9dy8Sdbj1hg9QK4GrDyDCVw/viewform
I’ll publish the full results in early September, including the breakdown by region, experience, and company size — and Ontario Construction News readers will be among the first to see them. If the unanimous verdict on the competence drought holds at 100+ responses, this industry has a data point it can finally put in front of the people who set training budgets and immigration quotas.
Until then, one number to sit with: fifty-three out of fifty-three.
Pascal Patrice, PMP, is a heavy civil construction project director in Quebec and the founder of TCC (Total Cost Control), a daily field reporting and cost tracking platform for contractors.
