New Federation of Piling Specialists chair and Expanded Geotechnical business unit leader John Chick aims to highlight the piling sector’s contributions to society and sustainability.

John Chick officially took over the role as Federation of Piling Specialists (FPS) chair from Central Piling managing director Steve Hadley at the trade association’s annual general meeting on 21 April.

Chick currently leads Laing O’Rourke’s Expanded Geotechnical unit and has a long career in piling and construction behind him.

Soon after graduating in 1985 with a degree in engineering geology and geotechnics from Portsmouth Polytechnic – now University of Portsmouth – he got involved in the piling industry. His first job was site engineer with Westpile, now part of Soletanche Bachy.

“In 1985, we were actually just coming out of a recession, so I became well aware that the construction industry is cyclical in nature,” Chick notes. “Once I got into piling I’ve never really been able to escape as I find it a fascinating subject. There’s a lot of science; there’s a huge amount of engineering.

“But there’s still a degree of art about it, as you have to visualise what’s going on under the ground and work in a domain that you can’t see.”

Westpile, which Chick says had an initial focus on driven piling projects, then became one of the pioneers of continuous flight auger piling in the UK. Chick was next offered the opportunity to move into pile integrity testing at a time when it was first being introduced in the UK.

“I always wanted to become an expert in something,” he says. “And I did that for about three years, including contributing to some research which is now commonplace. And now I can look back and say I was there at the beginning of it.

“It taught me a huge amount about the construction process for piling, where stuff can potentially go wrong, how the ground reacts with piles and what you can visualise happening through getting deeply involved in that testing and modelling process.”

He also got the chance to broaden his set of skills in other areas, including estimating and design. But it was his MSc in construction management at the University of Bath between 1997 and 2000 which changed the course of his career.

“At that point, I became fascinated by the business process but also by people’s impact on businesses,” Chick explains. “I began moving away from being the very ‘techy bod’ into the management side of things, including building teams and delivering projects and businesses.”

He then began working for May Gurney, running its piling business. Following the 2008 financial crash and a restructure at May Gurney, Chick moved over to Mackley Construction and soon after to Cementation Skanska.

As one of the directors of Cementation he looked after the preconstruction side of things, including winning work, design and estimating. Chick then joined Expanded Geotechnical in 2015.

As one of the key highlights of his career, he mentions the change in attitude he has witnessed when it comes to safety on construction sites.

“When I think back 30 years, people being injured on sites was actually quite commonplace,” he says. “The shift in the industry means that that is now unacceptable, and we’ve seen a move toward behavioural safety, which involves using people’s behaviours to improve safety and actually trying to understand how people behave.

Based on FPS figures, the UK piling industry is worth £600M to £650M a year. The wider UK construction industry is estimated to be worth £100bn to £120bn.

Chick believes that piling as a sector is thus punching above its weight and is still offering UK plc a pretty big bang for its buck.

“And a lot of people don’t realise the impact of the industry they’re in until you point it out to them,” he notes.

Accordingly, the influence that associations like the FPS can have should also not be underestimated. The federation has the ability to draw attention to industry issues across the board, whether they affect small to medium sized corporations or the big players.

“Steve Hadley has recently brought to the FPS a certain relevance for many of its members,” Chick says. “I think 10 to 15 years ago, it was very much seen as being about the big companies with big turnovers and big projects. I think Steve has brought a relevance and an awareness that there are a lot of other members within the FPS that do different things.

“I think there are a lot of very specialist, incredibly capable companies that just happen to be smaller because of the market they’re in.”

Chick wants to continue to bring their voices to the fore and continue the work Hadley started.

He also sees huge value in the work the FPS Early Careers Group does due to the urgent need to attract new, diverse talent to the industry and empower those individuals once they are involved. In addition to offering talks and skills development for industry newcomers, the group promotes engineering and construction at schools.

With an increasing drive towards sustainability, the requirements of the industry will also continue to change.

“The plant is changing, the people are changing, the environment is changing,” Chick says.

“So, as a career choice for young people – is it valuable? Yes. Does it contribute to society? Yes. Can we make a real substantial change to the environment and sustainability? Yes.

“But do we promote ourselves very well? No.”

He says that to make careers in the piling and foundations sector – and in geotechnical engineering overall – seem viable to young people, it needs wider exposure through various media.

The Breaking Ground podcast, which Hadley originally launched as the FPS podcast, is one avenue for discussing geotechnical engineering in a way that is accessible for listeners with different levels of industry knowledge.

Chick also wants to change people’s views on the piling industry’s effects on the environment.

“We are part of the solution; we’re not necessarily the problem,” he stresses. “If you look at wind farms, they need an awful lot of steel and concrete, as well as piled foundations. There’s a sustainability push in terms of making what we do greener.

“This relates to the material, plant and fuels we’re using and the emissions we create.”

The next stage of this work, which Chick is looking at with structural engineers, is sustainability by design.

“If you’ve got a big emphasis on how you can cleanly remove concrete from a pile while it’s still wet without having to use a jackhammer, that’s fine,” Chick says, “but don’t put it in, in the first place.

“Design it so that the piles are shorter, leaner, smaller diameter; design your basement so that your basement is actually working harder and challenging things like factors of safety, for example. Not to make things unsafe but trying to understand what a factor of safety actually means.”

He adds: “If you’re trying to use a factor of safety to dictate a settlement, you will always end up with over design. The piles will be deeper, they will be larger diameter, there will be more concrete, there’ll be more reinforcement, and you’ll burn far more fuel and do far more harm to the environment putting them in.”

This is an area where Chick believes the FPS’ influence and work can be extremely advantageous. The body can bring together ground engineering companies of different sizes – as well as underwriters – to discuss best practice and challenge the status quo.

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