For 15 years, Consult Australia’s Future Leader Program has provided once-in-a-career opportunities for rising stars in the built and natural environment sectors. The program targets professionals with five to ten years’ experience, developing their leadership, collaboration and problem-solving skills.
In 2025, the program is underway in Sydney and Melbourne, bringing together a dynamic multidisciplinary cohort. Over six months, participants will attend workshops and collaborate on a national-level project that stretches their thinking, expands their networks and develops fresh solutions to a ‘live’ infrastructure challenge.
Bright minds, challenging briefs
For the last two years, Infrastructure Australia has provided project briefs that expose participants to pressing national policy questions.
As Peter Lee, Director of Policy & Research at Infrastructure Australia, notes: “We value our partnership with Consult Australia, because we gain fresh thinking on problems we are grappling with right now, while also helping to develop the sector’s future capability.”
In 2024, the project brief was to design a tool to help decision-makers identify places where nationally significant infrastructure assets are most at risk from natural disasters. The winning team, FORTIFY, delivered a scalable digital framework and risk assessment methodology after more than 200 hours of collaborative work.
FORTIFY’s solution earned both the Judges’ Award and People’s Choice Award at the 2025 Consult Australia Awards for Excellence. Infrastructure Australia is now exploring how the learnings from FORTIFY’s solution can be incorporated into future projects.
“We were really impressed with how all the teams – not just the winning team – rose to the challenge we set. They showed real enthusiasm, talent and a commitment to high quality work. The depth of research, the innovative thinking and the communication of complex ideas blew us away. We were excited to throw a new problem at these bright young minds in 2025,” Peter adds.
A “spiky challenge” for 2025
For the 2025 program participants, Infrastructure Australia has set another “spiky challenge”: to quantify key areas of housing growth and assess transport infrastructure needs and gaps to support that growth.
“Understanding this at a national scale is a complex challenge with no easy answers. There’s a reason why it hasn’t been cracked,” Peter says. “But that’s why the Future Leader Program is so valuable: it brings together people from different disciplines, producing rich, diverse thinking. We’re looking forward to seeing what the 2025 cohort delivers.”
Find out more about the Future Leaders Program, or read more about the 2024 winning team, FORTIFY, in our back issue of Consulting Matters, or check out some of the other team solutions.