|  |  ACT Now!
Agency approves £6.3 million bid for UK's first Advanced Construction Technologies centre
Pic right: (from left) Clive Benfield, MD of KB Benfield Holdings Ltd, ACT-UK steering group chairman Ursula Russell, Mark Abrams, director for Coventry and Warwickshire AWM and Harry Hammersley, ACT-UK project manager celebrate the £6.3 million of funding received from AWM
A £6.3 million bid to establish the UK's first advanced construction technology and training centre in Coventry has been approved by regional development agency Advantage West Midlands.
Building work on the ground breaking ACT-UK National Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies, at the Coventry University Technology Park, in Puma Way, is expected to start in spring 2007.
The scheme is to be officially launched in the New Year at an event whose keynote speakers will be Sir John Egan, the former boss of Jaguar, and Sir Michael Latham, whose Government-commissioned reports on improving efficiency, quality and working practices within construction have changed the face of the industry.
The centre aims to address skills shortages, improve the quality and quantity of training and sustain a life-long learning culture within the industry.
The flagship centre will offer training and induction courses from primary school level through to advanced management training for experienced construction staff and professionals.
A key part of the flagship project will be the Building Management Simulation Centre - a large virtual reality simulation theatre which will recreate a construction site environment and use professional actors to create a 'real life' on site scenario for training and developing construction managers.
The BMSC is modelled on a similar project in the Netherlands where work has just begun on a pilot course aimed at the UK construction industry. The first one will be delivered in the New Year and run until the UK centre opens for business in spring 2008.
Big names within the construction industry have already pledged £250,000 towards the project, which needs an additional £850,000 to lever in the AWM grant. An initial £1 million plus of development money was provided by the Learning and Skills Council, who had received the cash via legacy funding from the Training and Enterprise Centre.
Major industry companies and bodies who invest in ACT-UK will have a key role in dictating the direction of the training centre. Advantage West Midlands, the Learning & Skills Council Coventry & Warwickshire and the Board of ACT-UK are urging other companies and industry to come forward and pledge further funding and support.
Ursula Russell MBE, chair of the ACT-UK steering group and former chair of the Learning and Skills Council Coventry and Warwickshire, said: "It is a truly ground-breaking project which will serve to attract more and better recruits into construction, improve management and professional skills to equip firms for the 21st century and provide the UK, the West Midlands and Coventry with a world-class construction management training centre."
Mark Abrams, director for Coventry and Warwickshire Advantage West Midlands said: "This is a flagship project in the High Technology Corridor in Coventry and demonstrates how the innovative thinking of local partners has a brought to the region a project which is a UK first.
"With the massive building programme that is expected in the West Midlands and the UK over the next ten years, this facility will provide a vital part in training the leaders and managers of the future."
Work began on the project in 2002, with an 11 strong team of partners including the Coventry and Warwickshire Learning and Skills Council, the Chartered Institute of Building, CITB Construction Skills, of which Sir Michael Latham is chairman, and industry leaders including Clive Benfield, managing director of KB Benfield Group Holdings Ltd and George Marsh, non-executive chairman of Chase Norton Construction, Coventry and Warwickshire's Construction Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) Coventry University Enterprise Ltd, Universities of Coventry and Warwick, Advantage West Midlands and Constructing Excellence.
Filming work on one of the first two simulations to be used at the UK centre has just begun - using a residential development in Wolverhampton on which Haslam Homes have just started construction. The second project will involve a multi-storey office block. |
| | 
Sir John Egan and Sir Michael Latham are keynote speakers at launch
The ACT-UK National Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies is to be officially launched on January 25 at an event whose keynote speakers are former Jaguar boss Sir John Egan and Sir Michael Latham.
The pair's government commissioned reports on improving efficiency, quality and working practices have changed the face of the industry.
The Latham report, compiled in 1994 - Constructing the Team - was based on the simple concept that through teamwork the construction industry could delight its customers. The report acted as a wake up call to an industry he described as ineffective, adversarial, fragmented, incapable of delivering for its customers and lacking respect for its employees.
His findings highlighted the fact that many of the problems were caused by excessive confrontation between parties involved in projects and he suggested collaborative working as a way of countering the problems of cost overruns and inefficiencies within the industry. His groundbreaking approach also suggested looking at the overall quality of the work and the best fit for the job rather than the lowest price.
The core message of the 1998 Egan report - Rethinking Construction - is that through the use of best practice, the industry and its clients can collectively act to improve their performance.
The report proposed the creation of a movement for change which would be a dynamic, inspirational, non-institutionalised body of people who truly believe in the need for radical improvement within the construction industry.
The report also encouraged the recognition that the industry can and indeed must do much better. |
| | 
Pic right: (from left) Clive Benfield, MD of KB Benfield Holdings Ltd, Peter Shearing, LSC Partnership Director for Coventry, Julian Ingleby, deputy director, Coventry University Enterprises Ltd, Lance Saunders, from the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB,) Harry Hammersley, ACT-UK project manager, Norman Stothers, ACT-UK business development manager and George Marsh, Chairman of Chase Norton Construction celebrate the £6.3 million of funding received from AWM
How industry benefits from virtual reality training
Training in a hyper-real or virtual environment enables tutors to put their trainees and students to the test in a way that would never be possible in conventional training or on a real building site, according to the team behind ACT-UK's planned building management simulation centre (BMSC).
And industry leaders believe it will speed up the training process and fill gaps left by traditional theoretical and on-site training methods.
The National Centre for Advanced Construction Technologies is designed to address the
site management skills shortage issues facing the construction industry. It will house the BMSC which will offer training in a hyper-real or virtual environment enabling tutors to test their trainees in a way that would not be possible on a real building site and that will enhance conventional training, according to the ACT-UK team.
They say this speedier and more effective training will lead to bottom-line benefits for
both projects and companies and that the experience will force students to draw upon
all of their skills at once - social, professional and technical - in order to complete the complex building tasks in hand.
Industry training expert Paul Sealy from Kier also believes it will speed up the training
process and fill gaps left by traditional theoretical and on-site training methods.
Mr Sealy, training and development manager at Kier, based in Sandy, Bedfordshire, said: "We see ACT-UK as enhancing technical training and we are particularly interested in the BMSC for the bespoke training packages it could offer Kier - that is defi nitely going to be new to the industry. We see it as speeding up site management training."
He added that traditionally the construction industry had relied upon theoretical training
and work-based learning and ACT-UK was filling the gap between the two. He said: " It should make training far more effective, provide more learning for the time spent training and mean messages stick with the trainees."
The BMSC will feature a 16-by-three-metre, curved theatre, which will recreate a construction site environment using a panoramic screen. Using a joystick the students can move through the building, along roads, inside rooms up stairs and on scaffolding where clever use of perspective means a student can even experience vertigo.
Tasks are set within an extremely intense and very pressured environment - one which
could never be carried out in the real world because of issues of safety and implications
of cost.
Harry Hammersley, ACT-UK's project manager, argues that, in a traditional training environment in HE or FE, each topic tends to be taught as a module with emphasis on technical knowledge and students rarely have a chance to amalgamate all their skills and put them into practice before they go on site as managers.
He contrasts that with the virtual training approach that emphasises competencies, such as organising, taking action, communication skills, problem-solving, decision-making and administrative skills in order to improve and maintain the management aspects of a construction project - time, cost, quality, organisation, information flow and safety. |
| |
|
