Sandi Rhys Jones
Sandi Rhys Jones works in the engineering, construction and property industries, providing strategic management, marketing and training services to a wide range of clients including developers, contractors, consultants, suppliers, representative bodies, the public sector and government. She assists organisations with talent management and staff development and has developed a reputation for being an inspirational speaker, role model and mentor.
As a director of RhysJones Consultants, Sandi has direct experience of recruiting, retaining and developing staff. Her company achieved Investors in People status and was the first SME to be nominated as an exemplar for the government Inside UK Enterprise programme for construction.
She is currently non-executive director of EngineeringUK and has previously served on the main boards of Docklands Light Railway, the Simons Group and the Royal Marines Museum, where she gained experience in audit, governance and remuneration roles.
Sandi has worked with a wide range of companies and organisations in the UK and abroad, from major businesses such as Tarmac and Rugby Cement, representative bodies such as the British Property Federation and the international consulting engineering federation, FIDIC, consultants such as Balfour Maunsell and Davis Langdon & Everest, national and local government departments and the European Commission.
Sandi’s range of experience has helped develop her skills as a mentor for individuals at all levels. She is also experienced in developing and managing mentoring programmes for companies and organisations. She leads the national mentoring programme for the Association of Women in Property, working across a wide range of disciplines including law, surveying, facilities management, construction and finance. She has developed an innovative mentoring scheme for a construction and property company, delivered mentoring training for a faculty of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and for the Chancery Bar Association and is currently leading a Mid Career Task Force looking to improve retention rates of women in the workplace.
In addition to business expertise, Sandi brings legal skills from having completed the MSc course in Construction Law & Arbitration at Kings College London. This has proved invaluable in project and contract management, drafting and editing of policy documents and in understanding commercial and employment law. Convinced that there are more constructive ways of resolving disputes than going to court, Sandi also qualified as a mediator, training which she finds very useful in day to day management and mentoring – and in family and personal life!
Married with three grown sons, she is a self confessed compulsive builder with a construction project in planning or under way most of the time. A music lover, from opera to contemporary orchestral works, baroque to jazz, she also enjoys travel, walking, gardening and writing.
Sandi was appointed OBE for her work in promoting women in construction. She is a Companion of the Chartered Management Institute, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building, Fellow of the RSA, a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. She has an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University and was awarded First Woman of Property by the CBI/Lloyds TSB.
