The Career Nobody Told You About
The cleaning industry has spent years building structured career pathways, professional standards and real progression routes. The problem is, it has barely told anyone.
In 2019, Corey Watts turned up for his first shift as a cleaning operative at one of our stadiums and got on with the job. He didn’t know it then, but that job would eventually take him to Australia.
Seven years later, he’s a People & Safety Coordinator at CleanEvent Services, overseeing compliance, health and safety, and workforce development across some of the country’s most demanding venues. The stadium shift is still in his history. It’s a foundation now, not a ceiling.
That distinction is everything. And our industry has been far too slow to make it.
The perception problem
For decades, cleaning has been framed as a transient occupation – something you do between other things, or when nothing else materialises. Anyone inside the sector knows that’s never been accurate. But perception shapes where people look for work, how long they stay, and whether employers invest in them. For too long, we let a damaging story go largely unanswered.
That’s beginning to change. Not through rebranding, but through evidence.
At CleanEvent, we built our business on stadium and live events work – environments where cleaning is time-critical, visible and operationally essential, not background activity. We’ve since expanded into other sites such as technical colleges, public institutions and commercial kitchens, each setting running on the same framework: trained people, clear standards and visible accountability.
It’s not an image exercise. It’s what happens when you treat cleaning as a profession.
What professional standards actually make possible
Ask Alfie Hennessey what changed his career and he doesn’t point to a single moment. He points to exposure. Starting as a general cleaner at Anfield, he moved through pre- and post-event cleans, into supervision, then across venues and eventually into CleanKitchen, our specialist commercial kitchen division. “Every day is different,” he says. “I’m always travelling to new venues and learning new things.”
That kind of mobility doesn’t happen by accident. It requires defined training, documented standards and managers who develop people rather than just deploy them.
This is where the BICSc framework has become not just useful but essential to the training and development of the Team. The Institute’s standards provide consistent outcome criteria, recognised competencies and shared professional language. This allows a worker’s experience to travel with them. Without that infrastructure, experience stays local and skills remain invisible to the wider market.
Progression in practice
Shauna Collins joined us as a Supervisor in November 2023. Within 18 months, she was promoted to Assistant Venue Presentation Manager at Cheltenham Racecourse. Her advice to anyone starting out is direct: “Take every opportunity to learn – those experiences are what build your potential to step up.”
That’s not an unusual sentiment in any industry. What’s less common is having the infrastructure to act on it. Apprenticeships, graduate schemes, competency frameworks – the cleaning sector has spent years building the scaffolding that a visible career requires. The challenge now is making sure people can see it before they’ve already walked past the door.
Building capability and closing the gap
The UK cleaning sector faces a recognised skills gap, driven in part by perception and in part by a simple lack of awareness. Young people don’t know the industry exists in the form it does – and that’s a problem we all have a role in fixing.
Industry bodies like the Cleaning & Support Services Association are doing important work here, engaging directly with schools and promoting clear pathways into the sector. Figures like Jay Adderley are contributing too, supporting outreach initiatives that connect education with employment in a way that’s practical rather than promotional.
Public visibility matters as well. Programmes like BBC One’s The One Show – on which CleanEvent’s Operations Director, Jay Adderley, was featured in an interview – have brought genuine attention to the scale and structure of modern cleaning operations, reaching audiences who would never have considered the sector as an option. The conversation is shifting – from recruitment to something more fundamental: building real understanding of what this industry actually offers.
A sector that’s quietly changed shape
The nature of the work itself has shifted. Automation and robotics are appearing across large UK sites, handling consistency while creating new roles in supervision and technical oversight. Sustainability is now woven into daily operations, from product selection and waste reduction to resource management, adding genuine complexity to jobs once assumed to be straightforward. In specialist environments like commercial kitchens, our teams work alongside food production staff, navigating compliance and safety requirements that directly affect public health.
This is not the same industry it was twenty years ago. The people doing the work have always known that. It’s taking the rest of the world a while to catch up.
The strongest argument is the simplest one
Corey went to Australia on an international exchange and brought that knowledge back into the business. Alfie crossed disciplines and found a specialism he’d never considered. Shauna was promoted within 18 months of joining. These aren’t exceptional outcomes engineered for a brochure. They’re what a structured, standards-driven environment produces when it takes development seriously.
Cleaning isn’t a starting point with no direction. It never really was. It’s an industry – our industry – that has built something worth talking about and is only now beginning to say so clearly.

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