A hairdresser-turned-surveyor with a passion for getting girls into construction
Posted on: 24 February, 2025
“If I went into a bar and said to someone, ‘can you guess my job?’ I can guarantee you even on 10 guesses they’re not getting it right”.
Name: Courtney Sowersby
Company: EYG Commercial & Trade
Of the typical careers people tend to pursue before moving into the built environment, hairdressing wouldn’t normally be on the list – but that’s what Courtney Sowersby was doing for several years before she started her apprenticeship.
“I tried out a few different things to find the right path”, she said. When Courtney realised she no longer wanted to be a hairdresser, she moved into maintenance management, where she dealt with contractors. It was this role that piqued her interest in construction, although she had no desire to spend 40 hours a week on-site.
“I’m a bit of a busybody, so I liked that every day was different. You’ve got projects, they have a lifespan, then you do something new. I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of it.”
The daughter of a joiner, Courtney was no stranger to construction sites, and while she has fond memories of painting walls with her Dad during her summer holidays, she “didn’t want to lay bricks”, and was keen to explore office-based roles in the industry.
Courtney hadn’t completed her A-levels, so she took an access module in order to enrol in the quantity surveying degree apprenticeship at UCEM:
“I fell on my feet a little bit. My company asked if I’d like to do a degree to be a quantity surveyor, and at that time I had no idea what a quantity surveyor was!” Courtney did some research and decided she wanted to take up the opportunity.
Choosing UCEM
With the support of her employer, Courtney was given a say in who was selected as the apprenticeship provider.
“It was kind of left to me a little bit. So I did my research to try and find a provider that was going to suit my working environment and the hours I’ve got. So it was actually myself and the HR team who did the research to find UCEM.”
Courtney and her company selected UCEM over other providers for several reasons. One was the university’s strong reputation in the industry and excellent reports of student support. Another was the provision of a specialist degree in quantity surveying with an access pathway, which not all providers were able to offer. UCEM’s remote learning model was the other big deciding factor:
“I’m in Hull, and there was one [university] in Leeds, but that’s an hour and a half on a train, and there were set days where you had to go in. UCEM is a lot more flexible, being online.”
Courtney feels her experience as a student has lived up to expectations, and provided her with the practical learning she was looking for:
“I remember in my first year being on-site, looking up at a roof and I was like, oh, my God, I know what that beam’s called!”
Support with studying
Studying alongside working would be challenging for anyone, but it presented extra challenges for Courtney, who experiences anxiety and is waiting for a medicated ADHD assessment.
Courtney credits the welfare team at UCEM with being proactive in offering support. They organised regular counselling sessions through a partner service called ClearLinks, and put two-week extensions in place for all of Courtney’s academic deadlines. However, Courtney always tries to stay a step or two ahead: “I try and aim for the proper deadline. And then I do have that two-week buffer period where if I need the extra time, it’s there,” she says.
Girls Under Construction
Gender bias is alive and well in the construction industry, in Courtney’s experience:
“If I went into a bar and said to someone, ‘can you guess my job?’ I can guarantee you even on 10 guesses they’re not getting it right”.
Courtney spends her limited free time travelling around the country as an ambassador for Girls Under Construction, an advocacy group that visits schools to talk to girls about future careers in the sector. “I’m trying to help them organise some more Yorkshire-based events, but I do spend a lot of time travelling down to London”, she says. Courtney tries to encourage the girls to link their interests and skills to the industry: for example, a student interested in art could pursue architecture.
Recruiting more women is the only way Courtney sees the playing field levelling:
“Women are still such a small fish in that big ocean of construction. A lot of the time, I’ll go on site, and the female toilet, you are guaranteed, is a cleaner’s cupboard shoved in a corner that you have to go find a key for.
“It’s a lot better than 10 years ago, but even now I’m lucky if there’s one other woman on site. We still need to push for quite a lot of change.”
Making a mark as an apprentice
What advice would Courtney give someone who was thinking about applying for an apprenticeship in the built environment?
“Don’t be scared to voice your opinion within your workplace,” she says. “At the end of the day, you’ve come in as the future of a company. If you see it that way, you’ll learn all this new information in your studies that I can guarantee you a lot of people in your company don’t know.”
Courtney shared an example from her own workplace, where they’ve recently implemented a new contracts management system. It’s the apprentices, and the younger people in the organisation who are helping the older employees embrace the change.
“With one of the systems I’ve seen, you can actually walk around site with a live map instead of your blueprints and that can then be uploaded straight onto the system. Apprentices have a great role within a company in balancing out the new and old.”
