Two Kinds of M&E Design Roles

Demand for M&E design people has climbed steeply this year

Hays calls electrical design engineering an acute pressure point, and the numbers back it up. What we are seeing across M&E building services matches it.

Design is one of the hardest hires in M&E at the moment, and the volume is only part of why. The other part is that two contractors can advertise the same job title and be describing two completely different jobs, and the advert rarely says which.

The volume itself is largely down to what is being built. As we set out last month, the North-West workload we are seeing comes from a spread of sectors rather than one or two, but data centres and healthcare are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Both are among the most services-intensive things anyone builds, which is a large part of why design demand has moved the way it has.

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The same title, two different jobs

Ask who actually does the design at an M&E contractor and you get one of two answers.

At some businesses the design manager runs a panel of external consultants. They set the scope, appoint the right firm for the scheme, review what comes back, and carry the technical relationship with the client and the main contractor. They do not produce the design themselves. Their value is judgement and standards.

At others the design manager runs a team of engineers inside the business who produce the drawings themselves. Same title, same salary band, and a job that needs a different person.

Here is one of the first, live on our board at the moment.

Read that advert carefully and you can see which model it is: appointing and managing external design consultants, building a reliable consultant panel, reviewing deliverables from concept through construction. Whoever takes it will spend their time on scope, quality and relationships rather than designing in Revit.

Now set that against a specialist M&E contractor in Warrington, which has been running six in-house design roles at the same time. Their designers produce the drawings and stay with the scheme after they are issued, and that is the thing they lead with when they are selling the job. Earlier this year we were also working on a set of in-house design and technician roles for a Tier 1 contractor across Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds.

Neither model is new and neither is unusual. The North-West has a deep independent building services consultancy base, and those firms are busy because contractors and clients use them. It is why the roles we carry with the word design in the title mean something different in almost every case.

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Why both models persist

Under design and build procurement the contractor carries the design responsibility. That has been true for a long time, and it is worth separating from the question of who does the work, because the two get conflated constantly. Responsibility sits with the contractor either way; resourcing is a separate decision, and it comes down to workload.

A contractor with enough repeat work of a similar type can keep engineers busy year-round, so an in-house team pays for itself and gets quicker at that client's schemes. A contractor with lumpy or varied work cannot, so a panel gives them the right specialism per job without carrying the cost between jobs. Plenty of businesses run some of both, which is worth asking about directly, because a role can sit mostly on one side and still carry a slice of the other.

Early contractor involvement complicates both, though. When a contractor is appointed before the design is fixed, the design work moves forward into pre-construction, which is where buildability, cost and programme actually get decided. Panels have to be appointed earlier and in-house teams resourced earlier, which is why the pre-construction managers we place spend more of their time alongside designers than they used to, whichever side of the fence those designers sit on.

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What did change

One thing in the regulations changed, and it gets discussed far less than it should.

Since 1 October 2023, Part 2A of the Building Regulations has placed duties on clients, designers and contractors on every piece of regulated building work. Not only on higher-risk buildings. CIBSE has been fairly blunt about the level of misunderstanding here, warning that anyone who believes the dutyholder and competence regulations apply only to higher-risk buildings needs to read them again.

What the regulations require is that appointed designers and contractors are competent for the work they take on. Part of the definition is a willingness to refuse work that cannot be built in compliance with the regulations. On higher-risk building work, clients also have to keep a written record of how they satisfied themselves that their appointments were competent.

It applies to both models, but it shows up differently in each, and that is what the design hire has to be able to carry.

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What this means if you design M&E

Find out which model you are applying into before you apply, because the job title will not tell you.

If you like producing the design, a panel-management role will frustrate you within a year, however good the salary is. If you have moved past wanting to draw and you are better at scope, review and holding a standard across several schemes at once, it is the one that will suit you better, and the one with the shorter route to running something. Two questions get you the answer quickly: who produces the drawings, and how many of the current schemes are consultant-led.

The tooling has moved regardless of model. Revit has shifted from desirable to expected across most of the design engineer roles we handle, and AutoCAD on its own is no longer enough on the schemes where the money is. If your last three years have been 2D, that is the single most useful gap to close. We wrote about this in January, when the shift was clear but the job specifications had not caught up.

On pay, senior design engineers saw an average increase of 3.9 per cent over the past year, ahead of the 3.5 per cent across building services as a whole. The ranges we are working to across the North-West sit around £50,000 to £65,000 for senior design engineers and £70,000 to £80,000 where the role carries the function, in either model.

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What this means if you are hiring

The most common reason a design search stalls is not salary.

It is that the advert describes a leadership scope and the interview reveals a hands-on job, or the reverse, and the candidate withdraws having worked out that the role is not what they want. Both jobs are attractive to somebody. They are rarely attractive to the same person.

The other thing is timing. The strongest design people are not on the market. They are settled somewhere, doing well, and being counter-offered the moment they give notice.

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The takeaway

Which of the two a business runs is not a sign of how serious it is about design. Contractors have carried the design responsibility under design and build for years. How they resource it varies business by business, and both models are alive and well across the North-West.

What has changed is that competence is now a duty on every job, whichever route you take, and that demand for the people who can carry it has risen sharply. The rest is a matter of being clear about which job you are offering, or which one you are applying for.