Ask any experienced Facilities Manager whether qualifications or experience matter more, and most will give you the same answer: both.
It's a debate that resurfaces regularly across the profession, particularly during periods when the job market becomes more competitive and candidates look for ways to stand out. The honest answer is that neither one substitutes for the other. Qualifications demonstrate a structured understanding of the discipline; experience demonstrates the judgement to apply it.
Why the Skills Gap Keeps Coming Up
Facilities Management has long faced a recognised skills gap, particularly around people management, leadership and project management. Surveys of the sector have repeatedly found that many managers are strong operationally but have had little formal training in the softer skills that leadership actually requires.
This isn't unique to FM, but it matters more here because the profession sits at the intersection of so many disciplines: compliance, contract management, health and safety, sustainability, and increasingly technology. A Facilities Manager without commercial awareness or people skills can struggle just as much as one without technical knowledge.
The Case for Qualifications
Professional qualifications through bodies such as the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM) provide structured learning that experience alone doesn't always cover. They can fill gaps in areas like health and safety legislation, sustainability frameworks or financial management, subjects that are easy to pick up incorrectly through trial and error on the job.
Qualifications also signal commitment. For employers reviewing a shortlist of similarly experienced candidates, a relevant qualification can be the differentiator that gets someone to interview.
The Case for Experience
At the same time, no qualification can fully replicate the judgement built through years of managing real buildings, real contractors and real emergencies. Knowing how to defuse a difficult conversation with a contractor, or how to prioritise competing demands during a crisis, is learned by doing it, often more than once, and sometimes by getting it wrong first.
Employers hiring for senior roles in particular tend to weight demonstrated experience heavily, because the stakes of a wrong decision in Facilities Management, safety, compliance, cost, are high.
Why the Either/Or Framing Doesn't Hold Up
Treating qualifications and experience as competing options misses the point. The strongest Facilities Managers we work with tend to have both: enough structured knowledge to understand why something is done a certain way, and enough practical experience to know how to actually get it done.
For professionals earlier in their careers, this usually means building experience while working towards a relevant qualification alongside it, rather than waiting until one is "finished" before starting the other.
Making the Most of Available Development
Training doesn't always require a significant financial commitment. IWFM, the RICS and other professional bodies run regular seminars, webinars and networking events, many of which are free or low-cost. Internal knowledge-sharing, workshops, mentoring, shadowing, can also close gaps without the cost of formal courses.
For employers, encouraging this kind of development isn't just good for the individual. It strengthens the wider team and helps close the skills gaps that surveys of the sector continue to identify.
Final Thoughts
The question of experience versus qualifications is the wrong question. The right one is how to build both, continuously, throughout a career.
Facilities Managers who combine practical, hard-won experience with structured professional development are consistently the strongest candidates we place, and the ones who go on to build the most resilient careers in the sector.
Talk to Maxwell Stephens
If you are hiring in Facilities Management, talk to our team about what the market currently expects. If you are an FM professional weighing up your next move, the Facilities Management jobs we are handling span the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
