Civil Drafter

You never asked to be anything other than very good at this.

But it comes up in every review. Have you thought about where this leads. Have you thought about stepping up. Have you thought about taking on more. Where do you see yourself in five years.

You give the same answer you gave last time, and six months later they ask again, as if staying good at the thing you're already good at is a holding pattern rather than a choice.

It isn't. And there's a drafting seat in Brisbane's inner south where nobody will suggest otherwise.

What lands on your desk

You're the third seat in a drafting team of three, inside a design group of nine. Exports come to you from whichever designer is running the project, and you turn them into roads, drainage, sewer and water drawings in the in-house templates. Unsupervised from week one. The project designer checks your work, then it goes to one of the two managers above that.

AutoCAD is the everyday tool, with Civil 3D in the mix as well. 12D is useful, but it's genuinely not a gate. The work is land development, roughly nine parts greenfield subdivision to one part infill, so there's real design drafting in it, particularly on water: live connections into existing infrastructure, and getting the fittings right.

Designers are assigned project by project, so you work across all of them rather than being welded to one person's habits.

A design path exists on paper. Nobody is going to push you down it, and you shouldn't take this role hoping they will.

Why nobody here seems to leave

Half the team has been past ten years. Some of the designers are past fifteen. When the hiring manager was asked to name someone who'd left, he couldn't do it quickly.

Ask for training, and you send a short email. It comes back approved inside two hours.

The hiring manager came from a tier one where the same request meant writing a business case, and he mentions the contrast unprompted. There's no KPI regime here either. His line was that his last firm was about numbers and this one is about people. Already booked for the year: an external session in October, plus 12d, erosion and sediment control, and a back-to-fundamentals drainage session.

The firm has been going more than forty years and sits at around 25 people across two offices, small enough that you'll know everyone's name and old enough that it has seen a few cycles come and go. Civil sits alongside several other disciplines in the same business, so the input you need tends to be a desk away rather than a subconsultant email. Some client relationships run close to thirty years. They're hiring now on purpose, while it's quiet, rather than scrambling when it isn't.

The office is five minutes from the train and the South Bank bus station, with cafes and the river at lunch. The first few months are full-time in the office; a couple of days from home are negotiable.

Where the money sits

The top of the range is for someone who works straight off engineers' markups, knows subdivision and urban development properly, knows what Council and the authorities want to see, and can run drawing packages and revisions without being chased.

Overseas experience is fine if the underlying land/urban development understanding and experience are real.

Talk to Dan first

Apply with your CV, and it goes straight to Dan Jones at Anjuna People. If yours is three years out of date because you've been busy doing the job, that's fine. Send what you've got and Dan will sort the rest out with you.