One of the biggest challenges the construction industry has today is inexperienced skilled labor, which impacts nearly every aspect of a construction project. The good news is with technology in hand construction professionals can bring experienced workers and inexperienced workers together, ultimately achieving the best from both.
This is a conversation I was having recently with Corey Johnson, senior director, construction product management, Bentley Systems. He says COVID has accelerated the need to better plan work because the skilled labor force has been looking for alternative types of work or has retired. With that, construction has seen an increased reliance on inexperienced workers in the workforce.
Finding Talent
How can we attract the right workers? Johnson gives a couple of salient suggestions. First, help the workers understand construction is a stable industry because construction never goes away. Second, show the workers the value of the work they are doing and how it directly influences the world around them.
“Construction impacts everybody’s lives,” Johnson explains. “It provides the roads we drive on, the buildings we inhabit, the clean water we drink, the air we breathe. Not many professions out there can have that massive impact on your daily life and give you stability and growth for the future.”
Next, he recommends construction companies need to properly invest in training and leverage technology to make a significant difference on construction projects.
“The construction market has been going digital for a while, but it is really starting to take off in the last couple years, accelerated by COVID, accelerated by the challenges of resources and materials,” he says. “That is what people like. They want to solve a challenge, they want to see the impact, and I think the construction market has a good future, as long as we can show the folks the value of what they are doing.”
Technology can decipher many of the industry’s hurdles. It can make jobsites more efficient, it can attract workers, and it can effectively bridge the gap between the generations.
Still, workers need critical training, the right documentation to understand the workflows, and finding that information is more important than ever. Add to this the fact everybody is spread thin, with not enough resources. Many people are working on multiple projects. Johnson explains that is only possible by having tools and technology that can collaborate.
“By accessing everything through the cloud, having access to the models, the documents, the photos, reality meshes, video, they can understand what is going on the project site a lot easier, even though they are remote,” he says.
Bridging the Experienced and Inexperienced
To illustrate this, Johnson shares two very specific examples of how technology can bring together inexperienced workers and experienced workers remotely and on site. The first is bridge inspections.
“Bridge inspections are very cumbersome, very undriven, because you have to have the equipment, you have to have people go down and inspect everything, which shuts down lanes of traffic, which slows everything down,” he says. “Now, you have people capturing the data with drones and reality data, and the experienced people back in the office can review it, and then you point out (the areas of concern).
“This is an important step because it is maximizing the people who do have experience, training the people who don’t have the experience out in the field, so they understand the process, but it is also reducing the risk. We don’t have people climbing all over project sites unnecessarily.”
Looking at another illustration, he says Bentley Systems is witnessing people making smaller, meaningful adjustments to their schedules, to improve workflows, which overall improves the project efficiency.
“There was an example on a project site where they were delivering prefab units on a multi-story building,” he says. “They had multiple crane locations and so forth. Because the whole staff could see different areas of the project that were being worked on and different delivery cycles, they realized before it was a problem that we cannot deliver all these units to this one crane pick site. We have to actually move it to another site.”
They were proactive and very efficient. The beautiful part of this story is the inexperienced workers were in the field and were able to see the impact of all of this, he says. That is how they become more experienced, and technology is helping to accelerate that.
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