Carolyn Bradley-Winnett, Pride in the Job 2025 Quality Award winner

With three Pride in the Job Quality Awards and a Seal of Excellence to her name, Carolyn knows what it takes to deliver consistent quality. Carolyn reflects on the challenges of starting afresh on a new site, the support she's had throughout her career, and how she’s turned doubt into determination as a woman in construction.

My name is Carolyn Bradley Winnett, I'm a site manager for New at Homes at the Heath in Huddersfield. It was absolutely amazing to win Pride in the Job 2025. I've won two Pride in the Jobs and was lucky enough to go on to win a seal of excellence for the previous site that was on and this will be my third. We came onto this new site and thought could we, could we not? But we work really hard to get to where we are. There's probably a combination of things for why I think we've won. We have a fantastic team, we work really well together.

Everyone's committed to helping each other out, also providing the best quality for us. Our ethic is to make sure that we build the best house possible for our customers. If we're doing that then realistically the quality and everything that we're producing should really be to the best standard possible.

This has been a really challenging sight, but for the positives we've learnt a lot from it. All that's done for us is give us more of a a push to work harder, to be more organised. All in all, probably is one of the most difficult sites I've worked on, but also it's been one of the best.

As a woman in construction, I've been really, really lucky. I think the only negative I've had was at a previous builder. They didn't feel that at the time and I'm sure things have changed that women could be site managers. They were quite happy as assistants, but I used that as a positive to make me stronger and just make sure that when I was ready to be a site manager that I've found the right company to go and work for. I tell everybody to be a site manager.

We have stressful days, we have difficult days, but All in all, I absolutely love what I do. I would say to any woman out there, it's a fantastic industry to work for. There's nothing better than being on site, having a laugh, having a joke. I would literally advise anybody to come to site and and do what I'm doing.

Winning priding job means absolutely everything because we come to work every day to build a good quality home for our customer. I don't come to work to win priding job, but actually winning that priding job is a recognition of all the hard work that not only I do, but my team does on a day-to-day basis.

Any advice I'd give somebody who's wanting to get their first pride in the job win?

Stick at it. There's going to be a lot of hard work ahead. But as long as you are already in that mindset that you want to provide the best quality possible, then on top of that, I think all you need to do is make sure that the people around you and yourself are committed to to to push higher and higher and higher.