A typical day at Story Homes starts with a coffee and a look through my emails to check the progress of our planning applications that are currently being processed.
We have a weekly Land and Planning team meeting which is chaired by our North East Land Director. We discuss the progress of each site and give our updates, talking through any problems or solutions. I am lucky in that I quickly felt like a valued member of the team – it is great to see how the work I am doing feeds into a bigger picture.
One of the Planners in our team, Richard Newsome, has developed a series of seminars which covers the core elements that planners tend to encounter, how to deal with them and what to keep an eye out for. They cover a range of topics including legislation, planning policy framework and development plans. Every week we tend to go through a different seminar and I find them really useful – they will give me a fantastic grounding to the role and it is great to have some structure around my learning as well as the on-the-job experience.
Shadowing Richard, I attend a lot of external meetings which is great experience. I am able to attend meetings with the planning departments of Local Authorities to discuss details of the proposals we are submitting – this is really useful and it is great for me to be able to start building contacts in the industry.
I am lucky in that I quickly felt like a valued member of the team – it is great to see how the work I am doing feeds into a bigger picture.
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