This summer I stopped and thought seriously about my next twenty years.
I’m 37. My days are spent bidding and executing physical water infrastructure: desalination plants, industrial wastewater treatment, reuse...
I enjoy that work and I’m not leaving it tomorrow.
But one question kept coming back.
Who is the elite in water? Which institutions, and which specific chairs inside them, actually shape this industry? And what would it take for someone like me to sit in one of them?
This is not about the “expected good salary.”
It’s about leverage: the power to create as much value as possible in a sector I care about.
And the thing is that you can’t decide on a Monday that you want it and have it by Friday. If I want real options at 50, I need to start moving at 37.
So I ran the exercise properly. I mapped the institutions, the roles, the entry doors and the constraints.
I talked to people who have sat in some of those chairs. And I reached a conclusion that I think applies to you too. Yes, you, the reader.
A small preview of what came out of it: one of the paths I analysed leads to a position paying more than €300,000 a year, requiring moving abroad with the family.
Another leads to one paying around €50,000, one lets me walk to the office.