TRAINING
“…sustainable and lean construction is already a reality but we do not have sufficient skilled professionals andworkers to make it become a ‘normal practice’.”
a EU-wide, recognisable and acceptable construction certification scheme will stimulate demand and support organisations with delivering quality. WHAT? Belfast Metropolitan College’s ARISE training platform - based on the unified certification scheme - hosts a variety of competence- based tools, for linking and enabling both supply and demand. The scheme will emulate mutual recognition of energy skills and qualifications in the sector, developing a type of sustainable energy skills passports/registers at regional/ national level for workers; facilitating the comparison of their skills and qualifications between countries and support for their take- up at EU level, mobile platform applications. We will achieve a digitalisation skills pathway by a dual approach: 1) Implementation of a set of digital construction skills, focusing on BIM to maximise the effect of sustainable energy skills (based on confirmed impacts from our current projects). 2) Through digital strengthening of E-training implementation, delivery and certification with transnational digital passports of skills. If skills are widely recognised and
standardised to comply, or in-line with the national frameworks, the market itself will demand them. CONCLUSION Gervase Cunningham, Lecturer in the Belfast School of Architecture and the built Environment at Ulster University states, “There is an increasing awareness within construction of the potential for digitisation to improve efficiency and productivity through the improvement of all construction techniques across the full project life cycle. This will continually improve innovation, quality and safety. It will also have the potential to considerably reduce the environmental impact of the construction process and the carbon footprint of completed assets as clients and other stakeholders become aware of issues such as waste in project delivery and waste and costs of the built asset during its operational phase.” Academic institutions such as Ulster University are ideally placed to respond to the developing need of industry to provide graduates with the knowledge and skills to drive this digital transformation. However, to realise this aim it is increasingly apparent that there also needs to be collaboration between academic institutions and also between academia and industry at both a national and international level.
Belfast Metropolitan College
Belfast Metropolitan College is a major provider of skills and training support for the built environment. This is achieved in collaboration with a wide network of stakeholders and partners including the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), the public sector and industry. For more information regarding courses, call: +44 (0)28 9026 5265, email: studentportal@ belfastmet.ac.uk or visit: www.belfastmet.ac.uk
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