By Pascal Patrice
Special to Ontario Construction News
In August I shared an early result in Ontario Construction News from an anonymous survey of construction project managers: every respondent said finding competent people has become harder. I promised the full results. Here they are.
Sixty-two project managers answered, 27 in English and 35 in French, from small contractors up to firms with more than 500 employees. The sample leans senior and leans toward Quebec. At this size, every percentage carries a margin of roughly 12 points either way. Read these numbers as a strong signal, not a census. The signal is strong, though.
The competence drought is still unanimous
Sixty-two out of sixty-two say finding competent, experienced people has become harder. Seventy-seven percent say “a lot harder.” That held through every wave of responses and in both languages, without a single dissent. Several respondents made the point that it isn’t only their own hiring. They see the decline at every link in the chain: owners, consultants, subcontractors and trades.
The job is being buried under everything that isn’t the job
Ninety-seven percent say paperwork and compliance have increased. Ninety percent say reporting has increased. Eighty-nine percent feel more schedule pressure, and 84 percent more margin pressure. Fifty-eight percent now spend more than half their week on administration, and nearly one in four says admin has simply “taken over.” Sixty percent describe themselves as more firefighter than manager. Just over half say they no longer spend their time on what they’re actually good at.
The written answers were sharper than the checkboxes. One PM: “Too many different platforms and places to store, move, and retrieve data… duplication of effort and wasting time doing things three different places.” Another named a problem no software fixes: “decision makers who actually provide answers instead of avoiding making decisions so they can’t get blamed later.”
Overruns still arrive after the money is spent
Sixty-one percent say they learn about cost overruns too late to act on them. Only 15 percent disagree. That figure has held at about six in ten since the first responses came in.
Look at how costs are tracked and the reason is plain. Only 24 percent use dedicated construction cost software. Twenty-one percent rely on spreadsheets alone, ten percent on accounting software alone, and 45 percent on “a mix.” One Quebec PM described the mechanics (my translation): “the project manager has to enter expenses manually, and sometimes we don’t have the supplier or subcontractor invoices.” The field knows today. The cost report finds out next month.
Nobody is afraid of AI
This was the result I didn’t expect. Eighty-seven percent of respondents expect AI to help them or to fundamentally change the job and only one person in 62 called it a threat to their role.
This industry hears constantly that it’s about to be disrupted, and its project managers seem remarkably unbothered. My read: they know exactly where their hours go. The re-entry, the chasing and the reports nobody reads aren’t the job they signed up for. They’d happily hand that part to a machine.
Same pressure, different morale
In the last column I promised a breakdown by region, experience and company size. At 62 responses, only the English/French split is large enough to say anything, and even that comes with a warning.
French language respondents are more senior and describe a harder job: 40 percent say “much harder,” against 19 percent. Yet 86 percent of them would choose this career again, against 63 percent of English respondents. Only 43 percent are considering leaving, against 59 percent. Six percent say they are close to burnout, against 30 percent. Those gaps sit near the edge of the margin of error for groups this small. They could reflect attachment to the trade, or the fact that English respondents skew toward smaller firms, where the same pressure lands on fewer shoulders. Treat it as a question worth asking, not an answer.
Across the whole sample the picture is mixed. Seventy-six percent would choose the career again, yet half are considering leaving, and half describe themselves as drained or close to burnout. Average job satisfaction is 6.4 out of 10. Only 40 percent are optimistic about the next decade.
These are not people who hate their work. They are experienced people who still believe in the work and are watching it get buried. I see two practical takeaways.
For owners and executives: find out how many hours your PMs spend re-entering the same information, and how many days pass between a problem on site and a number on your desk. Both can be measured, and both can be shortened.
For associations and anyone who sets training budgets: “sixty-two out of sixty-two” is a rare thing in this industry, a unanimous data point. Use it.
The survey stays open, and I’d especially like more Ontario voices and more PMs early in their careers. It is anonymous and takes about two minutes, in English or French: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe2RRf7bCnZ4_Iy953O48vAFYw9dy8Sdbj1hg9QK4GrDyDCVw/viewform
Pascal Patrice, PMP, is a construction project director in Quebec and the founder of TCC (Total Cost Control), a daily field reporting and cost tracking platform for contractors.
