What I Said FM Needed in 2007, and What It Needs Now

In 2007 I wrote an article for facilities-manager.co.uk called What does it take to be a facilities manager? I had been recruiting FM professionals for about eight years and had founded Maxwell Stephens the year before.

Reading it again nearly twenty years later is an interesting exercise. Some of it has aged well. Some of it describes a world that has gone. And some of the biggest changes in the profession are not in it at all. Here is what I said, and what I would say now.

1. The line between in-house and outsourced would blur

What I said in 2007: the FM market was no longer cleanly split between in-house corporate teams and outsourced providers. Customers were often "none the wiser" whether the person in the post room worked for a construction company, a specialist provider or an IT firm.

What I would say now: that blurring is now complete. Hybrid models, managing agents, integrated FM contracts and in-house intelligent-client teams sit side by side, often in the same organisation. The skill that matters most is no longer knowing which side you are on. It is managing outcomes across both: setting standards, holding providers to account and owning the risk regardless of who delivers the service.

2. Qualifications would start to matter

What I said in 2007: when I started recruiting, education was secondary to cultural fit and personality. By 2007, employers hiring at middle management and above increasingly expected further study in FM or business, plus financial management skills, and candidates were missing out on roles for lack of a specific qualification.

What I would say now: I was right about the direction, but qualifications have become a threshold rather than a differentiator. IWFM and NEBOSH credentials get you onto a shortlist. They do not win the appointment. At senior level, what decides it is evidence of judgement: how someone handled a contractor failure, a compliance gap or a difficult board conversation.

3. Health and safety would become non-negotiable

What I said in 2007: partly because of legislation and increasingly risk-averse clients, a good appreciation of health and safety, backed by a qualification, was "paramount" for anyone at supervisor level and above.

What I would say now: this has only intensified. The Building Safety Act regime, with its focus on higher-risk buildings, has put building safety accountability onto named individuals. Compliance is now a leadership competence, not a technical box to tick.

4. Flexible working would become a hiring advantage

What I said in 2007: graduates were asking whether they could work from home "in the same way that many looked at a company car ten years ago", and companies that insisted on everyone in the same office, nine to five, would struggle to attract the best.

What I would say now: I did not imagine how far it would go. The CIPD now reports that 74% of UK organisations have hybrid working in place. For FM, that cuts both ways. It is a recruitment advantage for office-based roles, and it has turned the workplace itself into the FM leader's problem to solve: why should people come in, and what should the building do for them when they do?

5. Churn and under-investment in people

What I said in 2007: most firms were not investing enough in developing their people, so facilities managers moved on every two or three years in search of progression and training.

What I would say now: sadly, this is still true. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people entering UK management roles had no formal management and leadership training, and SFG20's 2026 survey found 51% of organisations short of FM staff. The organisations that develop their own FM leaders are still the exception, and they still have an easier time keeping them.

What I missed

Three things now define senior FM roles that barely featured in 2007.

Sustainability

In 2007, FM's financial brief was to drive several per cent out of the budget every year. Today the same leaders are expected to cut carbon as well as cost. The UK Green Building Council attributes 25% of UK emissions directly to the built environment, and most of that sits in buildings FM teams already run.

Data and AI

I wrote that technology would keep changing the role and that anyone who did not embrace it would be left behind. I did not foresee buildings that report on their own performance, or AI embedded in FM operations: JLL found 28% of organisations worldwide have already done so. The skill now is not using the technology. It is turning its output into decisions.

Leadership judgement

In 2007 I argued that firms struggled to fill roles mainly because candidates lacked client relationship skills or cultural fit. Today I would go further. Most senior FM hiring failures are judgement failures, on both sides of the table. The leaders who succeed are the ones who stay calm under pressure, make clear decisions and can explain them to a board. That is what we now assess for above everything else.

What has not changed

I closed the 2007 article by saying there would never be one path that everyone should follow, and that the industry was "a concoction of individual specialists, brought together in a sophisticated manner" by those who understood the whole. That still holds. Facilities Management remains a profession of many disciplines, and the people who lead it best are still the ones who can see how the pieces fit together.

If you are building an FM team for the next twenty years rather than the last, we would be glad to talk.

The original article, "What does it take to be a facilities manager?", was published by facilities-manager.co.uk in 2007.