CEO DIARIES
Patrick Doyle, chief executive at WH Scott Group.
That only works if the underlying discipline is real, which is why we have put as much effort into integration and accreditation as into acquisition. Metlab’s achievement of full SAFed membership matters more to me than any deal we have done, because it is externally verified evidence of technical competence and impartiality, rather than a claim we have made about ourselves. The third differentiator is data. We complete well over 400,000 statutory examinations a year across the UK and Ireland, and we have invested in an online asset management portal and instant digital reporting so that customers can see the compliance position of every item they own on the day, rather than waiting on a certificate in the post. For a plant manager facing an audit, that is the difference between a morning’s work and a fortnight.
What do you like about the industry? The consequence of it. A shackle either holds or not. There is no room for the kind of vagueness you find in a lot of commercial life, and I find that clarifying. If our work is good, someone goes home at the end of a shift who otherwise might not have. If it is sloppy, that shows up too, and quickly. I also like the people. Lifting attracts practical, direct, quietly proud engineers who have often spent thirty years accumulating judgement that no manual contains. They will tell you exactly what they think of a decision, which is a considerable asset in a chief executive’s life – provided you are willing to listen.
And it is a small world. Globally, the overhead lifting sector
is a village: the same faces at LiftEx, at HIREland, at the association meetings, year after year. Reputations are built slowly and lost quickly, and relationships outlast individual contracts by decades. That has an honest disciplining effect on how you behave The variety is the last thing I would mention. In any given week our people are working in pharmaceutical plants, data centres, water treatment works, dockyards, rail depots, wind farms and lift shafts. Very few industries put an engineer in front of that range of problems.
Why should people want to join and work in this industry? Because the work is real, the responsibility comes early, and the qualifications travel.
18 | September 2026 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
I would start with the honest problem, though. LEEA’s
own State of the Lifting Industry research – drawing on more than 350 organisations in over 50 countries – found what everyone in this industry already knew: we have a skills shortage, the training pathways are too narrow, and the next generation has essentially never heard of us. Lifting has been a hidden career. Fixing that is a marketing problem before it is a recruitment problem. The pitch, when you get the chance to make it, is a strong one. A trainee examination engineer is trusted with genuine technical judgement within a couple of years – not preparing a slide about someone else’s decision, but signing their name to whether a piece of equipment is fit to lift a load over someone’s head. The competence is portable: the standards we work to are recognised internationally, so an engineer trained in Wicklow or Wexford can work almost anywhere. The work is varied, because it is site-based rather than desk-based. And it is durable in a way that a lot of employment is not, because statutory examination does not stop when the economy
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