Building an Intentional Career in Tendering & Bid Management with Veronica Simeoni
Building an intentional career in tendering is not something most people set out to do. They fall into it, get good at it, then wake up one day and realise they have built a whole professional career around deadlines, stakeholders, and the strange mix of calm and chaos that comes with bids.
That’s why I wanted to talk to Veronica Simeoni. Veronica has spent close to three decades in strategic pursuits and submissions across water, transport, civil infrastructure and building. She’s also one of the strongest advocates I know for tendering as a profession.
Veronica started at Multiplex, working with a general manager who pulled her into everything. She described being so included in the work that you knew every crane on the skyline. That kind of exposure does two things. It teaches you the mechanics of a project, and it makes you care about what is being built.
That thread has stayed with her. Though the sector has shifted over time, her love of infrastructure has not. Veronica is the kind of person who wants to understand what is being built, how it works and what it means when it is finished. In tendering, it’s a skill.
It is also why tendering can be such a satisfying career. You work on something, the business wins it and then it comes out of the ground. You can point at a road, a bridge, a water asset and quietly think, I helped bring that into the world.
What makes a submission professional exceptional
When I asked Veronica what separates a competent submission professional from an exceptional one, she didn’t go straight to writing skill or technical knowledge. She went to maturity, especially around stakeholders.
Tendering is a role full of spinning plates. You’re coordinating subject matter experts, chasing inputs, managing reviews, keeping the bid moving and doing it while the goalposts shift (because they always do).
The difference is how you respond when they do. Exceptional submission professionals plan hard, but they also adapt without drama. They can reset quickly, find the next best option, and keep the team moving.
Tendering needs a real career path
Veronica’s MBA research focused on something our industry has known for a long time, but rarely treats seriously: Bids are not a small part of business. They are a major revenue engine.
Her research showed that around 40 percent of new business revenue comes through bids. It also showed that more than 80 percent of people working in this space are degree qualified, often with business, marketing or communications backgrounds.
And yet, almost nobody enters tendering through an intentional pathway. People just fall into it.
So what is the answer? Build more formal post-employment qualifications in the tertiary space, including graduate diplomas and micro-credentials. Then go further. Create a new business bid major within a Bachelor of Business, so school leavers can see tendering as a real career option, not an accidental one.
Structure is what makes collaboration possible
We also talked about what it takes to create structure and clarity in a dynamic bid environment. And for Veronica, it starts with the basics.
Plan. Write. Review gates. Bronze, silver, gold. The structure isn’t complicated, and it’s non-negotiable.
I said something in the conversation that I still find frustratingly true. Every project we deliver off the back of a tender is planned and managed. But tenders themselves are often not treated like projects. They are treated like an emergency.
Veronica made the comparison in a way that any infrastructure team will understand. You don’t build a road by ordering all the materials the day before practical completion and hoping it works out. You have milestones. You have a critical path. Tendering is no different.
When bids go wrong, nine times out of ten the review process has failed. This isn’t because people are lazy, but because the structure was not respected in the first place.
Culture does not happen by accident
On bigger bids, structure alone is not enough. You also need to set expectations for behaviour early.
Veronica talked about those large pursuits where you might have four or five organisations coming together, a hundred people co-located, and months of intense delivery ahead. Collaboration does not just happen because you put people in a room. It needs onboarding, clarity, and leadership that actually walks the talk.
This is where the Bid Manager matters. Often, the Bid Manager is chosen because they’re likely to deliver the project. That makes sense technically, but it can be a mistake culturally. The Bid Manager sets the tone. If you get the leadership wrong, the culture falls apart, and the bid becomes a stressful environment that burns people out.
We also touched on something that sounds small, but is not. The physical and admin environment matters. If you are going to pull people out of their day jobs and put them into a bid room for five months, treat them like humans. Working monitors, ergonomic chairs, functioning air con, clear parking arrangements, basic admin support. These are not luxuries, but a part of respecting the work your people are doing.
If bids bring in a huge portion of revenue, then organisations need to treat bid teams with the same seriousness they treat delivery teams.
AI is a tool, not a shortcut
We could not avoid the AI question, and I was glad Veronica went there with optimism and realism.
She is all for the use of AI, but she is also clear about the risk. People outside our space can treat AI like a silver bullet, where you press a button and a bid appears. The problem is that what comes out is often not representative of the company. It misses the rich intelligence that sits inside the business.
But Veronica and I agree that the biggest win is retrieval. Surfacing stored information faster, so smart people can spend less time searching and more time thinking.
If AI can get you from zero to 30 percent in hours instead of weeks, that is powerful. But the rest still needs human judgement. The crafting. The empathy. The value proposition.
Internally, we have landed on a simple mantra. We treat anything generated by AI like we would any other subject matter expert. We critique it. We quality-assure it. We call it mediocre when it is mediocre, and we call it strong when it is strong. We do not outsource thinking. We use the tool to create time for better work.
Advice for people entering tendering
When I asked Veronica what advice she would give to someone entering the profession, she came back to environment. Get into the right team with the right mentor, work with people who respect the skills and understand the space, ask questions, and be curious. Choose a sector you genuinely care about, because that interest will carry you through the pressure and the repetition.
Tendering is messy, stressful, and often misunderstood. But it is also a career built on learning, people and the satisfaction of seeing something real come to life because you helped win the work.
And if we want more people to choose it intentionally, we need to treat it like the profession it already is.
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:51] Deb: Veronica Symone. Hello.
[00:00:53] Veronica: Hello Deb.
[00:00:54] Deb: Thank you for coming to Chasing the Wind. You have been in bidding, dare I say, for a [00:01:00] long time.
[00:01:00] Veronica: Yes.
[00:01:01] Deb: And I'm really, really glad you could join us. You've worked in strategic pursuits and submissions across all sorts of sectors, water, transport, civil infrastructure, and obviously we've known each other a number of years now, and I've really appreciated the time that we've spent together.
[00:01:16] So thank you so much.
[00:01:18] Veronica: I really appreciate the call outs.
[00:01:19] Deb: You're an exceptional advocate for tendering as a profession in an art form, and I guess that comes from having had a long career in it. What initially drew you into submission management, and what have you found that sort of led to that longevity in the area?
[00:01:35] Veronica: So I started my career at, um, multiplex in, in this sort of space, I suppose in the civil and then building, building infrastructure space. Worked for a. Fantastic general manager, John Gaskin there, who really just launched my, my curiosity, which would be a word I use a lot into the space. And he was just really included you into everything.
[00:01:57] So you sort of, you know, knew every crane on the [00:02:00] skyline sort of a thing. So I think I really, um, thrived in that environment and that's what really got me interested in that space at the time. It was a long time ago, almost 30 years ago. So I think the role of a submissions manager at that point was really quite unknown.
[00:02:17] And so that role came to be in that business. I took that role on, um, and really dedicated my time to just working on, on the bids that we worked on, worked on some fantastic things, Portside Wolf, l Park, all of those really like cool jobs that you just, that's, you know, really interesting and they're the things that I think I really loved and enjoyed.
[00:02:39] And then I think going forward, what has sustained that is a similar sort of love for infrastructure. So whether it was buildings in the beginning and now more, the last sort of part of my career has been in the civil infrastructure space, not as shiny roads and bridges and, and you know, wastewater and water.
[00:02:57] But what I think the, the, [00:03:00] the thread across all those things is that you are working with people who are building infrastructure. And I love to see what they're building and I love to understand what they're building. And I keep going back to that curiosity. And even when I recruit people, I talk a lot about that being curious.
[00:03:17] 'cause to me that's what has sustained me in this space for so long, for that 30 years. I just, I just love the knowing and seeing and talking to people that's,
[00:03:25] Deb: you can have this multifaceted skillset that goes with being a submissions manager or a tenderer in general, but then the subject matter changes constantly.
[00:03:33] Oh,
[00:03:33] Veronica: constantly. Yeah,
[00:03:34] Deb: constantly. You're learning constantly and that curiosity just, just keeps you going. Yeah. And I dunno about you, I find, you know, you mentioned Portside and other places. I find you've done the tender, the company wins the business, and then it comes out of the ground.
[00:03:49] Veronica: Yes.
[00:03:50] Deb: And you're like, I wrote some of that.
[00:03:51] I, I, I wrote about those pipes.
[00:03:53] Veronica: I like to claim that I actually named Portside Wharf in the tender. Okay, good. I don't know if I can claim that, but I did. [00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Deb: I'm I'm happy to give you credit for it. Why not. And then in those roles, as you've moved through sort of, um, submission management roles, generally writing, um, stakeholder management coordination of, of, of, you know, subject matter experts and teams and, and different technical dynamics, what do you then see as the sort of the core capabilities of a, of a submission professional?
[00:04:23] What makes us an exceptional submission professional?
[00:04:26] Veronica: Yeah. And that's a really difficult. Questioned, I think to answer because there is such a myriad of skills that you need in this space. And I, I think, I don't have to tell you, looking for that unicorn who has so many skills. 'cause you need to write, you need to coordinate, you need to be a people person.
[00:04:44] You need to also, you know, know when to bring people in. So there's so many skills, I think. But if I had to. Pick something out that then took someone from being, 'cause people, everyone's got skills from being sort of, you know, really competent
[00:04:59] Deb: Yes. [00:05:00]
[00:05:00] Veronica: In what they do to someone who I think is really exceptional in what they do, and you can see that they're just going to thrive.
[00:05:06] I think having a little bit of that maturity around that stakeholder piece. Yeah. And it goes back to what you were saying before, the, the beauty of the role is that it is so dynamic all the time, but you need to be a really high planner, but also quite adaptable. Yeah. So the ability to have some maturity when the goalpost will change because they will, they will.
[00:05:30] And you have to be able to say, okay, what's plan B? What's plan C? So I think not everyone can do that. Well, whether that's like a natural aptitude, some people obviously have for that or whether it's a maturity that some people have for that. So I suppose that's that internal stakeholder management kind of piece.
[00:05:51] Because without that, without being able to bring the team together and keep everyone on track, the best and most skilled people [00:06:00] and the smartest people in the room, you can't get it down on paper. Well, in a good time.
[00:06:05] Deb: I totally and utterly agree. I mean the stakeholder management even on the smallest tender is complex.
[00:06:12] Veronica: Yeah.
[00:06:13] Deb: Um, and that's because we go through this cycle of human dynamics. Every time we do a bid, you know, every, every bid comes together and they form and they storm. Yeah. Yeah. And then they norm and then eventually they might perform. But it's really the submission manager that brings everybody together to be able to finally put all of that human dynamic on paper to submit.
[00:06:37] Um, and that, that takes enormous skill.
[00:06:39] Veronica: Yeah. And I think what comes to mind, and I always, it's those spinning plates, I always say to people, it's like the spinning plates, you know, you sort of set one off, set another one off, set one off, and then you have to go to the beginning and sort of set it off again.
[00:06:51] But when everything's going and you've got a lot of people in the room doing a lot of work, I feel that the team needs to look over at that bid production [00:07:00] team, whether it's riders, missions, managers, coordinators, whoever it is that that core team, they need to look over and go, everything's under control.
[00:07:07] Once that team, that core bid production team starts panicking and you know, flying off and you lose what should be that calm in that chaos. And I think that that goes back to that whole maturity. Don't get me wrong, we can all kind of, it's okay to be stressed and it's okay to have all the things, that's fine, but the ability to then reset.
[00:07:29] Deb: Yep.
[00:07:30] Veronica: And just stay calm. Okay. What's the solution here? What do we need to do in all of the chaos when everything's going on? That's what people look to. It's like the duck, you know, in the water and the feet
[00:07:40] Deb: underneath. I call, that's what I call one of my people in Perth. I call her our duck. Yeah. Because she skims across the water, but her feet are holding
[00:07:46] Veronica: that underneath.
[00:07:47] And no one needs to know that. And
[00:07:49] Deb: no one
[00:07:49] Veronica: needs to. We need to know that. And we support those people. 'cause they need us to recognise and we know that. Yes. Um,
[00:07:56] Deb: but everyone else just needs to see the duck.
[00:07:58] Veronica: Yeah.
[00:07:59] Deb: Skimming [00:08:00] across it. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. That you've embarked on an MBA because you're a crazy woman.
[00:08:05] You decided to have a massive career in an incredibly stressful field and also go back to study. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about what your um, research project is. A capstone Yeah. Is about, um, because I'm really interested in, in the topic.
[00:08:19] Veronica: Yeah. So I've finished now. Oh, happy. Are you at UMBA? Yes, I am. I'm done.
[00:08:24] Congratulations. Dated about 12 months ago now. Congratulations. So amazing. So it was really good. I ended up doing the capstone at the end, which you kindly, um, provided me with some research, um, advice into and, and the people at, um, tender plus as well. So the capstone was really on this, what I called the report in the end was fragmentation to formalisation 40% of new business revenue.
[00:08:51] I think my research showed, comes in through bids. So when you think about that, that's quite an important piece. There's also then the, obviously it gets sustained through repeat business and [00:09:00] everything once it comes in the door. It's quite an important function within a business. And I don't think any business doesn't not recognise that.
[00:09:07] The research showed that, uh, more than 80%, which I think we already know of people working in our space are degree, qualify. I know myself that the majority of people will have a bachelor of business or, uh, marketing or comms seem to be the typical ones. Yeah. In that submission space.
[00:09:27] Deb: That's really interesting that more than 80% of people a degree qualified because regardless of that, I don't know anyone that didn't fall into tendering.
[00:09:35] Veronica: Yeah. A hundred percent.
[00:09:36] Deb: And so it's never really been something that has an intentional career path behind it. From your research, what recommendations did you make for, you know, really bringing tendering to the fore as a career?
[00:09:50] Veronica: Yes. There were three core recommendations. Two of the recommendations from a practical perspective.
[00:09:56] And you focused on building in more formal [00:10:00] qualifications in the tertiary space.
[00:10:01] Deb: Yeah. For really
[00:10:02] Veronica: post-employment.
[00:10:03] Deb: So encouraging
[00:10:04] Veronica: residential. Yes. Graduate and graduate sort of diplomas, that type of
[00:10:08] Deb: thing. So is this where I plug the fact there is a, now a strategic tendering worker credentials,
[00:10:12] Veronica: so, and micro-credentials and postgraduate as you've already started with your micro-credentials.
[00:10:18] Yeah. So really important space because that will provide some visibility.
[00:10:22] Deb: Yeah.
[00:10:22] Veronica: And it's an easy place to start from and also for universities. 'cause universities will need to understand that there's actually a need for this type of. Professional training within that tertiary um, system. And so the third and the big sort of thunderbolt that I would love to see is that there is like a new business bid type of major within I would think a bachelor of business.
[00:10:46] Deb: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Veronica: And it sits there as part of that undergraduate offering.
[00:10:50] Deb: Yes.
[00:10:50] Veronica: And that's where it should be. And it gives visibility to school leavers that this is an opportunity and this is actually a career path. And that's where you get to that intentional career path.
[00:10:59] Deb: Yeah. As [00:11:00] you know, I've been advocating for this for a long time and I, you know, I did launch a, a diploma of business development and tendering cancer got in the way of it continuing.
[00:11:08] But you know, if there's any universities out there listening today, hello, you've got two people here that are absolutely advocating that tendering needs to have become part of a major or minor of a tertiary qualification, if not to degree in and of it.
[00:11:23] Veronica: Yeah, a hundred percent. And hopefully there's an opportunity for industry to partner with a university and make that happen.
[00:11:29] Deb: Fingers crossed. Moving a little bit forward into something else you, you mentioned before that, you know, we talked about the duck and tenders often require somebody that to bring the calm to chaos. How do you personally create sort of structure and clarity in a really dynamic and complex bid environment?
[00:11:48] Veronica: Personally, or with my team? It goes back to the 1 0 1 structure, writing plan review gates, bronze, silver, gold. You need to have the structure. Mm-hmm. You need to have good planning in place. You need to have the right [00:12:00] people in place. It is really fundamental. Not really hard to think about those foundations of what you need in that space.
[00:12:08] Deb: I find it somewhat ironic that, you know, every project that we implement off the back or that our organisations implement off the back of a tender. Is planned and managed. And yet so often in tendering, a tender is not treated like a project and managed and such. A hundred
[00:12:24] Veronica: percent.
[00:12:24] Deb: And isn't that what people need to take away, that a tender is a project, it has a cycle.
[00:12:30] Yep. It needs to be structured and it needs to be managed as a project. Um, it's kind of not rocket science, and yet sometimes organisations are left to flail around as though the, as though a tender isn't a project.
[00:12:42] Veronica: Yeah, I totally agree. And in my space, um, I've probably apologise to all the engineers out there now that I'm going to say this, but I'll often say it's no different to a, you know, building a road.
[00:12:53] You have a programme in place, that's it. You have a practical completion date, you have a start date, and you have sections of the road that you [00:13:00] need to handle. I suppose
[00:13:01] Deb: in between
[00:13:01] Veronica: you have procurement, critical path, all the rest of that. Yeah. This is no different. So you don't have a practical completion date of the 10th of March.
[00:13:10] And then on the 9th of March you have all of your materials turn up and then the next day the road is open. So it's no different and exactly the same. It's exactly the same. It's a Gantt chart, it's a planning process. There's milestones. So the amount of times when things don't go well, and I will go back and I'll, you know, the first thing, well, how did this happen with the review process and nine times outta 10, the, the review process has failed.
[00:13:34] Deb: Bidding's really collaborative, I mean, even on the, the smallest jobs says collaboration. What have you found most effective when trying to bring together, you know, engineering, commercial operations, bd, how do you pull it all together smoothly, but more from a kind of personal dynamic kind of way, rather than what we just talked about, you know, and a tenant needs to be managed as a project.
[00:13:59] Veronica: You can't do [00:14:00] that without the foundation that we just spoke about. Definitely the collaboration piece, I think is like all collaborative pieces. We're now talking about the people in the room. Especially if you're, you're on a big bid where it's, you know, you've got four or five businesses, organisations coming together.
[00:14:16] You might have a hundred people working in a co-located place. You know, and you've got four months to bring together a huge amount of deliverables and you want everyone to collaborate. So the expectations of the team, the behaviours of the team, all need to be set at that early onboarding kickoff piece, which I think sometimes gets forgotten.
[00:14:35] Deb: It does. It sets the scene that, and we come back to that human dynamics, you know, it, it, it happens every time. Even if you know each other exceptionally well, you're still forming and storming right at the beginning of that, of that group dynamic process. And so you need to do it every single time.
[00:14:51] Clarity of roles and responsibilities and leadership. Yeah. So what comes
[00:14:55] Veronica: with that is, is leadership. So appointing the right [00:15:00] bid manager for the right bid. So often, you know, we will put in, the bid manager will be the person who maybe is going to deliver the project that makes natural sense from a technical, commercial perspective.
[00:15:12] But I think that we also need to, as a, as organisations, we also need to think about the right bid manager in there because that leadership role and they set the culture and we can do any sort of onboarding at the beginning and we can talk about respect and all those things, but you really need someone who's actually then going to walk the walk.
[00:15:31] Deb: Yeah.
[00:15:31] Veronica: And you need that right person in there.
[00:15:33] Deb: Yeah. And if you get that wrong at the beginning, that's often where bits fail,
[00:15:38] Veronica: culture falls down and people are, you know, people aren't happy.
[00:15:42] Deb: Yeah.
[00:15:42] Veronica: People are already working under stress. Um, and it's just not a, not a great environment to be, you know, a part of, and, and no one wants that when they show up to work in the day.
[00:15:51] Deb: I remember an experience where, you know, I had five organisations on a bid, big PPP, they all came from, you know, very [00:16:00] nice environments where the, the employees were retreated. Well, where they had a chair that actually worked for them and they were thrust into this bid environment with monitors that didn't work.
[00:16:11] Uh, non ergonomic chairs. Uh oh. You'll just have to hot seat it. Yeah. Um, all of that air conditioning that didn't work properly. Oh, how long are we going to be here? We're going to be here five months. Okay, that's great. You're putting humans on a project. You or in an organisation, you treat them, you have hr, you, you, you surround them with the scaffolding they need to thrive, but all of a sudden on a bid, it's like, oh no, you can't afford that.
[00:16:39] Just chuck everybody in a room and, and we'll just see what happens
[00:16:43] Veronica: if you are going to be there for five or six months. Admin for the team, someone looking after and letting everyone know where they can park their cars. I know this sounds really small, but we are plucking people out of their jobs to come and work on these, you know, in these environments, whether they like it or [00:17:00] not.
[00:17:00] 40% of new business Yeah. Comes from bus. And in my space, in infrastructure, that will be even more. I mean, yeah, pretty much everything comes through a competitive bid process.
[00:17:10] Deb: Yeah. So I guess, uh, the call out to organisations is to treat your bids the way you would treat any other aspect of your organisation with complete and utter respect for the process.
[00:17:23] Um, invest in it, plan for it. Have structure around it and appreciate that ultimately it's a human dynamic that's going to win this thing, isn't it?
[00:17:33] Veronica: Yeah. And going back to I think what we were speaking about before as well have the right people with the right skills in the, in the team. Yeah. Because that is really fundamental to ensuring that, you know, every, everything is going to work as well.
[00:17:46] So don't just throw people in because they're available or whatever. Just we really have to think about who's going to make this successful. This is a winnable project. This is really important to the business. It's going to give us work for the next five years.
[00:17:58] Deb: Yeah. Treat it as such.
[00:17:59] Veronica: [00:18:00] Treat it as such.
[00:18:00] Deb: Absolutely. Technology and ai. Dare I throw it out? I
[00:18:04] Veronica: love it.
[00:18:04] Deb: Oh good. Excellent. Yay. So rapidly transforming the way bids are done, the way submissions are developed. What are your thoughts?
[00:18:13] Veronica: I think that there's a lot of good things. I'm not a naysayer like I am. I'm, I'm on, I'm on and I'm in. But we've got a lot of really smart people.
[00:18:20] So I hear stories about total bids being like sped out through ai. Yep. But then what comes out isn't actually representative of what the, the company. Um, which kind of is, kind of makes me cry a little bit because I know that there's so much rich intelligence that sits inside the company that's not coming through.
[00:18:40] So I think people who don't know and don't understand our space that we work in think that it's just, you know, it's a silver bullet. Yeah. Press the button, here you go. Yeah. I think it's going to have a lot of really great advantages. Um, there's a lot of really good skills that I think the rest of us are going to learn as part of it.
[00:18:57] You know, learning how to prompt learning how to really [00:19:00] get the best of it. What I think that we need to understand is, 'cause there's a lot of sort of shiny products out there being thrown at us. You'd be the same
[00:19:08] Deb: Absolutely.
[00:19:08] Veronica: Phone calls every other week.
[00:19:10] Deb: Let's just say. I get a lot of LinkedIn requests.
[00:19:12] Yeah.
[00:19:13] Veronica: Yeah. What is the problem here that we're trying to solve? That's where I always come back and I did a, a business case for a business that I worked at, or organisation that I worked at recently. Yes. There's lots of things and lots of features that these platforms can provide us with, but what is the problem that we're trying to solve?
[00:19:29] And in my mind, and this is for me and everyone can be different. Yeah. I think one of the biggest advantages or immediate advantages is the retrieval of that rich stored information. So I like it as a tool that can help me with that capture management piece. Mm-hmm. Because there is an awful lot of time going back through records or we've done this before, or where is it?
[00:19:53] And having something that can bring that to the fore and allow the smart people in the room to access to that. To that. [00:20:00] Yeah. I think that's amazing. So getting from that zero to 30% Yeah. In, in hours instead of weeks or days instead of weeks.
[00:20:08] Deb: Yeah.
[00:20:08] Veronica: Amazing. Yeah. The content curation and, and all of those other features, which I think is the big pieces that everyone's looking at the most.
[00:20:17] Great, love that.
[00:20:18] Deb: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:19] Veronica: That to me is not the problem I'm trying to solve. If I could access, you know, if I could spend less time looking for information, that means that I can put my smart people on, as you said, crafting those messages and then getting that value proposition in.
[00:20:34] Deb: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what's coming out from a lot of people that I'm talking to is it's a tool, it's a great tool, it's an amazing tool.
[00:20:41] It's going to continue to evolve, but ultimately you have to add the human intellect, the human empathy, and take it as a starting point to build from, um,
[00:20:53] Veronica: agreed.
[00:20:53] Deb: And make sure that it is reflective of, of the client that you're actually pursuing in the first place.
[00:20:58] Veronica: Yeah.
[00:20:58] Deb: We're all gradually getting to [00:21:00] sort of the same footing.
[00:21:01] Veronica: Yeah. And you probably are a little bit the same. It's does get, um, yeah. Frustrating. You do get sort of people even internally or you know, sort of providing you with advice around, you know, we should be doing this, we should be doing that.
[00:21:13] Deb: I've had these chats and, and obviously we've had a lot of internal chats.
[00:21:17] We've landed on a symbol mantra internally now, which is we treat anything generated by AI as we would any other subject matter expert. Yeah. We will critique it, we will quality assure it. We will say, when it is mediocre, we will say when it is wonderful. And by treating it that way and recognising a human is connected to what was produced, that constructive feedback is going straight back to the human as great or lacklustre or.
[00:21:43] Good starting point needs work on. Um, we're just not treating it any differently. We recognise it's out of the bottle. We recognise we need it for efficiency and you know, we're not naysayers. It's the same, but, but the journey continues. I agree.
[00:21:55] Veronica: Yeah.
[00:21:56] Deb: For someone aspiring to enter into this [00:22:00] messy but fun but kind of wonderful profession that we're in, what advice would you give to the sort of way they go about it and, and the breadth of skill and resilience they need to, um, survive and thrive in it?
[00:22:13] Veronica: I think being in the right environment with the right team and a good mentor. So you would be the same. And you recruit a lot of people, you talk to a lot of younger people who are just starting their careers and when you hear their stories about where they've come from and why they're looking for a new role, um, it's oftentimes maybe they just, their role wasn't quite understood in the business that they were in and so therefore they weren't thriving 'cause they weren't using all their skills.
[00:22:45] So my advice would be get in with good like-minded people. Work for people that respect the skills and can see the skills. And understand the skills and understand this space. Ask questions, be curious. Do [00:23:00] this role in a sector that you love. I love infrastructure.
[00:23:03] Deb: Yeah.
[00:23:04] Veronica: I'm an infrastructure nerd. Building civil roads, whatever, it's, they're always interesting to me.
[00:23:10] So I think that that's when you will thrive, which is probably the same as any job.
[00:23:15] Deb: Yeah. Thank you so much. I love chatting with you. I'm looking forward to our next coffee when we don't have cameras and microphones involved. I can't thank you enough for your time.
[00:23:24] Veronica: Thank you so much for inviting me. Ah, it's been lovely.
[00:23:26] Really nice. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.
