A culture built on quality

Meet Mark Otte, our Quality Manager 

Mark is a walking building code and brings a depth of knowledge and experience to drive and manage our commitment to quality for our clients.   With a trade based background, and over 30 years working on construction sites, Mark has first hand experience in what it takes to deliver a quality product in both the residential and commercial sectors.  As our Quality Manager, Mark assists our teams with quality controls, updates in code and legislation, training and technical support.

What projects have you worked on at Alder so far?

As a civil and commercial building company, I’m required across all of our projects.  At the moment this ranges from bridge upgrades and civil early works to state-of-the-art education precincts and commercial office developments.

What personal qualities help you succeed in your job?

Being able to draw on my years of knowledge and experience in my various roles and a desire to pass on as much knowledge as I can to our site teams. The desire to be better is a big driver and education is essential.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge in the construction industry at the moment?

I feel the biggest challenge at the moment is our lack of quality tradesman on our sites.  There are not enough young apprentices coming through and all the older, experienced tradesmen are retiring.  This is leaving a huge gap on our sites when it comes to completing good quality and compliant works.

What do you enjoy most about your role as Quality Manager?

Seeing our site teams and trades learn about aspects of construction they didn’t know about before and then seeing the improvement of our company as a whole as a result of it.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

My family and watching a lot of sport (when it is being played!) keep me busy, but the biggest thing I do outside of work is help raise awareness in the community about suicide prevention in young men and return soldiers.  It is such an important subject we don’t hear about a lot, but we lose a return soldier every day to suicide.