Why is mid-level management the most neglected stage for training and development in construction firms?
In construction, corporate training investment clusters at two extremes: graduate entry programmes at one end, and senior leadership preparation at the other. The vast middle layer—people who have been promoted into management on the strength of technical competence alone—receives almost no structured support on how to actually lead others. They are expected to figure it out while simultaneously hitting fee targets, managing a younger generation below them, and navigating upward to more senior colleagues.
Vanessa Murray and her co-founder Ceri Moyers built The Circle Partnership's Circle Academy precisely to fill this void. One figure makes the scale of the problem concrete: Circle Academy accepts participants aged 23 to 55, all of whom self-identify as mid-level. That 32-year age range is not an accident—it reflects just how long and varied the mid-level career stage genuinely is in the built environment. The absence of industry-wide support across that entire window is, in their view, a structural failure, not an individual one.
The consequence is predictable: people arrive in management roles without the interpersonal toolkit to succeed, and when they struggle, the organisation reads it as a performance problem rather than a development gap. For mid-level women in particular—especially those in the 28 to 40 age window identified as the primary retention risk—this lack of support compounds existing cultural pressures. As Murray and Moyers observe, the full conversation on Pegasus Radio makes clear that retaining talent already inside the organisation is far more cost-effective than recruiting replacements, yet most firms continue to concentrate investment at the pipeline entry point.
"If you fix the women in inverted commas, you're not doing anything. If they're going back into a culture which isn't changing, you're still going to have the same problem."
— Vanessa Murray, Co-founder, The Circle Partnership
About Vanessa Murray
Vanessa Murray co-founded The Circle Partnership alongside Ceri Moyers, drawing on direct experience from the property side of the built environment sector. Over roughly six to seven years of operation, Murray and Moyers have built a dual-track business: the Circle Academy, a structured development programme for mid-level women in construction and property, and a separate consultancy arm that advises organisations on the cultural conditions needed for a genuinely diverse workforce to thrive.
Murray's authority on the mid-level training gap comes from the programme itself. The Circle Academy's participant age range—23 to 55—reflects a deliberate design choice rooted in years of observation: mid-level is not a narrow career window, and the support deficit spans the entire stretch. Her work positions the problem not as an individual confidence issue but as a systemic failure of how construction firms structure their people investment. That framing—fixing the culture, not the individual—is central to everything The Circle Partnership does.
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The co-founders distinguish between quotas, which mandate specific representation percentages, and targets backed by genuine cultural commitment. They warn that quotas without cultural change can create unintended negative consequences for the women placed in those roles, undermining the very progress they are meant to generate.
The co-founders argue that the experience of women aged 28 to 40 is hugely varied and cannot be reduced to maternity as the primary driver of attrition. A range of structural and cultural factors—not parental leave alone—explains why mid-level women leave construction at a disproportionate rate.
While the language and overt behaviour at corporate level in construction has improved compared to 10 to 15 years ago, the fundamental challenges have not meaningfully shifted. Surface-level progress has not translated into lasting structural or cultural change.