WORLDSKILLS for a world-class future Alisder Brown


Alisder Brown and Gary Hogg of BakerHicks use their knowledge of the construction industry to discuss how embracing the WorldSkills programme could avoid a potential disconnect between what students are being taught and what they will actually encounter in the real world.


Gary Hogg


students with an education that is both practical and relevant. Content must be such that it moves beyond theory, ensuring that theoretical discussions around BIM are more closely aligned to real-world environments and scenarios. We have been involved in the BIM WorldSkills


competition from its inception, working closely with Michael Maguire, Lecturer and BIM Lead at New College Lanarkshire and Steve Taylor, Partner Development Executive at KnowledgePoint, to create the competition content. This link to real- world scenarios has been essential; by ensuring that the competition is geared to how real projects work, we can help make the step from education to employment a much easier one to take. Ensuring that these students can be assured


F


ounded in a Europe recovering from the destruction of the Second World War, the


WorldSkills programme was created with the aim of promoting skilled careers amongst young people. With a huge skills gap threatening to cause an economic crash, it had a key role to play. Fast-forward 70 years and whilst the socio- economic circumstances surrounding it have greatly changed, the WorldSkills competition is still going strong and continues to have the potential to carry out that same role. Pitting the best students across the globe


against each other in a competitive scenario, WorldSkills fosters excellence in a variety of trades, from brick laying, to hairdressing, to engineering. The series continually looks to push competitors forwards, preparing them for the challenges of the modern world and simultaneously giving them the skills to succeed. This is being pushed further forwards through


the series’ collaboration with industry partners to create the competition content. We’ve seen this in action through our involvement in the Building Information Modelling (BIM) category, which we have been involved in as lead judges this year. But what this experience has also highlighted for us, which is something that reinforces our own experiences, is that employers are increasingly concerned that university and college students may not be fully prepared for the workplace when they graduate. This is especially true of the construction


industry, and the recent WorldSkills competition really demonstrated to us that there is potentially a disconnect between what students are being


November 2019 www.education-today.co.uk 11


taught and what they will actually encounter in the real world, especially in relation to specific disciplines such as BIM. Keeping up with the continual evolution of


what our industry needs from its future employees is a challenge, but it is obviously critical to the direction the construction industry is heading. Happily, the vast majority of lecturers, in our experience, are more than ready to welcome the support of private industry in shaping the syllabus to build on essential theory and add further content better matched to what future employers are looking for. It is important that we build upon this and help ensure that we create a curriculum that provides


that they are equipped with the actual skills an employer is looking for is perhaps the key point in all this. It is here that the WorldSkills competition comes into its own. It is proven to make students more employable. Providing tests which come from real-world industry challenges prepares them properly for the actualité of their working lives. As a business, we have ourselves taken on two of last year’s competitors after they demonstrated an extraordinary level of skill, knowledge and passion for BIM. And, there is another point, and one that will


perhaps resonate even more with those colleges and universities that strive to be the first in the choice set: colleges and universities who encourage their students to take part in WorldSkills become more attractive places to study. It gives them a point of difference in an increasingly competitive environment, and genuinely prepares their students for life beyond the college gates.


uwww.bakerhicks.com


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