“Is the RICS an irrelevant bloated establishment fat cat from a bygone era where badges were more important than whether or not you could tie a knot?”
I read in the Times on Sunday an article about the senior leaders at the RICS losing their position; a load of redundancies, furlough and all the other negatives that you might associate with a virus from China.
But the RICS’s problems, in my view, began more than 30 years ago when they lost their relevance and annoyed huge numbers of aspiring professionals. That has continued to this day as I see it and the Institution steeped in British history should now be closed and allow the other institutions in this country to take on their mantra.
When I was a naive young aspiring member of the great institution, I graduated with a degree in Estate Management from the University of Westminster. I then embarked on the Assessment of Professional Competence for nearly a decade, working with progressive, hungry, and very wealthy mobile phone companies and utilities. Acquiring rights for property needs of all types, planning consents, valuations, surveys the whole mix, I worked hard and studied to be all I could be. They failed me 4 times before I said enough is enough. Failed me on the grounds that my experience wasn’t varied enough or relevant to the institution! But what about how the property market is moving I wondered? Having a badge doesn’t mean that one can’t tie a knot at a time when my career ascendancy exceeded most senior partners as well as most practice owners. To say that I was not very happy is an understatement.
A few years later they rang me to ask why I had not “tried again”. I explained to a rather uncompromising caller what had gone on and when I refused his request to get involved with the great institution to help them understand my perspective, he was very surprised – I replied with a big fat NO!
Since then, my career has continued to ascend the boundaries of badges and the establishment. I have been involved in the development of standards (being invited to write and writing one of them) with other more forward-looking institutions like the ICE (S), The TSA and the BSI amongst providing advice to both the HSE and the Home Office. Where was the RICS in this mix? Nowhere to be seen in what I have come to understand as an arrogant entitled narcissistic position that is only predicated on its History.
I wish them all the best but what I would say to all those who aspire to badges, the worst thing that you can do is focus on the badge rather than making sure that you can tie a knot. Particularly when the scoutmaster who is teaching you can’t!
Indeed what I have come to understand about this Virus is that one positive thing it might do, assuming that one survives it, is weed out some of our Great British history that adds no value!
