How to catch up with BIM fast?

Here are some good options if you want to get overview or some hands-on skills.

Firstly, we are not in any arrangement to promote these resources, we have just listed out the sites that most people have found helpful. Some are used regularly by skilled users and novices. As a minimum, this list of will make it quick to look around for what suits you.

With these you can access flexibly, is free, and you can dive in as deep as you want.

Those that are video based, like YouTube, are probably the most easily accessible to start with, but you may find that the written material is more efficient once you have grasped some basics. The Balkan Architect and CAD Tutorial are individually run YouTube channels that many find good for beginners.

Autodesk is a corporate vendor, the people that make REVIT and many important packages. Their website and YouYube channels cover a very wide range of products. If you look at the Autodesk University channel on YouTube you will get a good overview of the new ideas in the industry, what is coming and there are more straight forward tutorials. The content for beginners is comprehensive but you do have to dig around to find what you need – this is the theme park for BIM geeks!

Think first about how deep adoption really is across the industry. You can read some material from some recognised BIM champions, such as NBS Enterprises ‘BIM+ Survey’ in the UK and in the US, The National Institute of Building Sciences. These will tell you that although the industry is making progress in digital technologies, uptake of BIM Level 2 in the UK remains slow. ‘Level 2’ is the BIM level of proficiency that it is generally accepted that we should all be at.

It is judged that about 73% of practicing engineers have good awareness of BIM, but only about 40% of projects use BIM as the norm. It a strange way, this may help to put the matter in a more palatable context – perhaps you are not the only one?

You can find the NBS here and the National Institute of Building Sciences here. Both are worth a look.

In the past, design tools developed slowly, and it was easy to learn them on the job. But now, the lifecycle of a software tool can be shorter than that of an engineering project.

Companies that aren’t set up to learn fast will struggle in the new age of digital delivery, while those that take learning and development seriously will lead the market.

It’s not just design tools that are evolving fast, it is the way we manage projects and models using collaboration platforms, like ProjectWise and SharePoint, that enable critical collaboration and workflows around a single source of shared data.

This means not just getting up to speed with the technology, but also finding new ways to automate processes – as this is where the real efficiencies are gained.

It’s our senior people, project principals and technical directors that have the toughest challenge. Their leadership role naturally means they are a step away from design production, but it is essential they retain a working knowledge of how design is now produced and have hands-on experience of the main design authoring and review tools and how data is managed in a common data environment. How can these key people remain relevant when their appreciation of the tools that underpin their teams’ work becomes diminished?

To lead the doing, you must know how it is done. Firms will start to lose the benefits from their most gifted engineers if they cannot keep up with the delivery tools – the very people who make professional services not just good but great.

With advances in how knowledge is managed within an organisation, the days when senior staff could rely solely on their experience are gone.

A new balance needs to be struck between humans and machines and that calls for greater digital know-how.

Human experience, intuition and interaction are still invaluable. For example, while advancing technology is a strong catalyst for innovation, innovation needs to be managed. It requires insight into customers’ needs, a bright idea, resources and leadership, and a process that manages the development of that idea into something that adds value.

And while machine learning has given rise to computers that can beat grand masters at chess, we are a long way from the day when a computer comes up with a good idea and can appreciate the overall impact of that idea. We still need people to evaluate the right balance between the needs of programme, cost, quality, sustainability, and risk.

However, data correctly gathered, managed, manipulated, and shared can profoundly change perceptions and enable much more powerful, value-adding decisions. The pairing of experience and digital intelligence will be one of the key attributes of the best advisors within a matter of years, if not months.

To compound this, following COVID-19, we are in an uncertain market environment where Consulting Engineering firms will be wanting to hold back on, what we have traditionally called, overhead costs.

We are seeing now that the Consulting Engineers those who are investing in technology, the management of knowledge and innovation, and in learning and development are differentiating themselves and lead the market of the future.

Some of the larger firms have been through a learning curve already, having made significant investment in global enterprise license agreements with software vendors.

Firms must offer all of our staff access to the latest and best tools they need, supported by global training and technical support. BIM feels like a train leaving the station. Those that are fully on-board have a huge advantage. As it gathers pace others will have to run ever faster to catch up – and there will be some who won’t be able to.

A practical approach must bring technology into the heart of planning for bidding, budgeting, and project delivery.

Over the past few years, we have seen our project technology groups move from providing project support to standing front and centre of our client-facing delivery teams. This has happened naturally in response to market demands as we’ve driven innovation and new delivery models. The days of learning on the job really are over. Let’s use the technology as an opportunity to build our skills to enable construction professionals to lead the way internationally.