The civil design lead dilemma: Is your candidate a designer or a coordinator?

A role with an identity problem

Civil Design Lead. The title sounds unambiguous. In practice it spans an enormous range, from the engineer who produces structural calculations, drainage designs, and foundation specs to the professional who has spent a decade reviewing and coordinating other people’s civils work without producing much of it. Both exist. Both call themselves Civil Design Leads. Both have CVs referencing substation civil design and multi-disciplinary coordination. And, as several clients have learned at some cost, they are not the same person and do not do the same job.

The two profiles

The Designer

Produces civil and structural designs directly and owns the technical content. They calculate foundation loads, specify drainage, develop cable routes from scratch, and produce drawings that go to site. Their depth is in the engineering: soil mechanics, structural loading, Eurocodes and BS standards, substation-specific civils. When they say "I led the civil design," they mean they did the engineering.

The Coordinator

Manages and reviews designs produced by others. They may have been a designer earlier, but their role has shifted to coordination: keeping civils, structural, electrical, and mechanical designs consistent, managing change, and reviewing deliverables against scope. Their value is integration and oversight. When they say "I led the civil design," they mean they managed the process.

Neither is inherently better. A complex multi-discipline project may need exactly the coordinator; a design-build contractor producing detailed packages from scratch needs the designer. Hiring the wrong one creates a gap that takes months to close.

The signs on a CV

These are signals, not certainties. The only reliable way to tell is a structured scenario that forces design thinking.

The video assessment scenario

We present this and ask the candidate to walk us through their approach:

"You are Civil Design Lead for a new 132kV AIS outdoor substation on a brownfield site. The survey shows made ground to roughly 3 metres with variable bearing capacity, and an existing drainage system that cannot be relocated. Walk me through your civils design development, from site investigation to detailed deliverables."

It is not intended as a trick question. It is designed to reveal how deeply someone understands the process and where their experience actually sits.

A Designer’s answer looks like this:

They start with ground investigation: What additional SI they would specify, what geotechnical parameters they need, how they would handle foundation design given variable bearing capacity. They discuss piled versus pad options, equipment-layout implications, the drainage challenge, and the interface with primary design in terms of equipment loading, citing specific standards. It may not be perfectly organised, design thinking rarely is, but it is specific, technically grounded, and clearly owns the engineering decisions.

A Coordinator’s answer looks like this:

They start with the team: Who they would engage, which specialists they would bring in, how they would manage the interfaces. The answer is built around process and management, describing reviewing specialist designs rather than producing them. Again, not wrong, if you need a coordinator, that is the right answer. The point is the scenario reliably reveals which profile you have.

The outcome

One client, an EPC contractor with a pipeline of detailed civils packages, used this scenario and spotted within the first three assessments that two of their five longlist candidates were Coordinators, not Designers. Without it, both would likely have reached interview, and possibly offer, before the distinction surfaced. The other three were genuine Designers. One was placed and started producing detailed deliverables in their second week. That is the value of assessment design: not cleverness for its own sake, but specificity in service of a better decision.