u/CandyCane147

How long does it take to be promoted internally from Assistant QS to QS?

Was recently told by one of my senior QSs in a 1-to-1 that I’ve been doing really well, and to keep my head down, continue working hard and I’ll be QS in a year.

From the company’s point of view, I will be a capable surveyor on the cheap as I imagine I will be promoted to earn around £40k while running jobs with minimal supervision.

On the other hand, they might think I’m just a good assistant and keep me as a donkey for payments and orders.

How long did it take you to go from AQS to QS?

I’ve noticed that the people who are constantly praised for “going above and beyond” at work often aren’t the ones with the heaviest workloads.

A lot of the time, the genuinely busy people are fully occupied just keeping up with their actual responsibilities. They don’t have spare capacity to volunteer for extra projects, attend every optional meeting, or create new initiatives.

Meanwhile, some people have lighter workloads, so they have time to look for additional tasks. They find things to do, take on visible side projects, and end up looking like they’re working harder than everyone else.

To management, this can appear as exceptional effort. But in reality, it may just be that they had enough free time to seek out extra work in the first place.

The people who are overloaded and quietly delivering on a mountain of core responsibilities often go unnoticed because they don’t have the bandwidth to do anything beyond what’s already on their plate.

“Above and beyond” doesn’t always mean someone is working harder. Sometimes it just means they had more capacity to make their work visible.