Fiercely passionate with a big heart, Alison is an unshakable optimist, always smiling and approaches everything she does with the same cheerful enthusiasm and pragmatic approach.

Alison is married to a fellow lover of all things ‘great outdoors’. She’s Mum to a music-mad future Live Sound Engineer and Step-Mum to a horse-mad groom at the Royal Mews.

She’s a former Land Surveyor and always called it the ‘best job in the world’ – until she started COYO of course. She now ploughs her energy into helping young people discover what they might ordinarily miss.

Alison cares deeply about the future of the construction industry. Her enduring ambition to enable the development of home-grown talent through the Design Engineer Construct! Learning Programme is now being fulfilled globally. This is thanks to her hugely dedicated team and the support of the incredible COYO ‘family’ of like-minded education and industry professionals.

In recognition of her years of commitment, Alison has been awarded a Doctor of Engineering honorary degree from the fantastic Heriot-Watt University, elected Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and awarded the President’s Award and Richard Carter prize. She was nominated to the Board of the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre, represented Youth and Learning for the Construction Industry Training Board Council and honoured with an MBE for services to education in HM The Queen’s 2018 New Year Honours.