Southland’s Regan McRandle could just be civil construction’s biggest fan. When he’s not out building roads, he can often be found at school careers events, where he never tires of spreading the word about an industry he says can provide a career for life and take you all around the world. You might call him ‘Mr Infrastructure’.

Currently running Southland business Site Civil, Regan says he wishes he knew about all the opportunities in civil construction when he first started looking for a job. Instead, it was just sheer luck that he ended up in the sector.

“Kind of like a lot of people I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do when I left school and just fell into the industry, found I loved it and went from there.

“I found it exciting because it’s good outdoor work, you get out and about and there’s a lot of great people you get to work with.”

With decades of experience he’s just about done it all, from being a lab technician and surveying, to engineering and contracting to owning his own business where he is the self-proclaimed permanent ‘Employee of the Month’.

Regan’s career has taken him all round the globe and he’s proved that you can start at the bottom and work your way up the ladder to own your own company.

He’s done everything from building back country roads in Southland to taxiways at Heathrow Airport in London while jumbo jets took off and landed on either side of him. Closer to home, his favourite project involved sealing 23 kilometres of gravel road through The Catlins to open up tourist access to Slope Point at the bottom of the South Island – winning an award at the CCNZ Southland branch regional construction awards in 2019.

Regan says infrastructure is more than just a job to him, it’s an opportunity to shape the world around him for the better.

“How you know the difference between a first-world country and a third-world country is essentially the level of infrastructure you’ve got. The better infrastructure you’ve got the better quality of life people have.”

When the EPIC Careers in Infrastructure campaign was launched by Civil Contractors New Zealand in 2017, Regan helped spearhead the campaign by visiting schools to open students and young adults’ minds to the wealth of opportunities in infrastructure.

When the careers campaign came out, Regan realised it was a fantastic tool to promote an industry that, at the time, didn’t really promote itself.

He felt EPIC and Civil Trades certification were great ways to recognise the high-level skills of people in the industry and took personal responsibility to tell the world about the great opportunities on offer.

“We have a lot of very skilled operators and absolutely talented people working in civil infrastructure.

“The grader drivers in 20-tonne machines, sitting 12-foot in the air with a 14-foot-long plate trying to cut a road to within five millimetres while working on public roads – surgeons don’t have that sort of skill, and they don’t have to deal with traffic and the general public.”

Regan says when he started off visiting schools he asked students if they knew what civil infrastructure was and sometimes the blankest looks he got were from the teachers – something he’s determined to change. He sees his mission as creating awareness in young people’s minds about what the industry does, and the potential for them to jump into big machines and get their teeth into large-scale projects all over the globe.

“You build up the picture that this civil infrastructure thing is everywhere, if you get a good career here it’s a trade that you can take anywhere around the world.”

He emphasises that while civil infrastructure needs all sorts of workers, including those in the back office providing support, hands-on practical people who “do the doing” are the industry’s backbone. Once people get the basics down and prove their capability there are all sorts of career options available, he says.

“You can work out in the field, and then find career paths into the engineering, into the management, into the IT side of things. Being your own boss is definitely achievable too.”

Regan says after a recent quiet period he thinks that the industry is about to take off in 2025 and it’s the ideal time to be epic and jump on board to kick off a career that “takes you places” and improves the quality of life for everyday Kiwis.

>> Wondering where to start? Check out our Careers Roadmap to see what kind of opportunities are in store across the civil infrastructure construction industry.