A Greek Odyssey

There is a cruel irony in any overseas conference that decides to focus on sustainability. And if the delegates flying four hours to the Greek island of Rhodes for the annual ECA get-together were still undecided about the inconvenient truth of climate change, the local weather did its best to persuade them. Powerful winds in normally serene May meant planes could not land on Rhodes, bringing a spot of unscheduled island-hopping to the social side of the agenda.

So, a half day later than planned and down to business. New ECA president Bob Hall set the scene for a conference that built on the last couple of years’ themes of changing drivers in building services and how to profit from them. “The focus on sustainability and energy conservation, combined with advances in technology such as converged integrated systems covering lighting controls, data, voice systems, access, building management systems and the rest will change dramatically the skill sets needed to build the buildings of tomorrow,” said Hall. “M&E contractors have the opportunity to move themselves out of the lower ranks of mere ‘subbies’, scratching around to get paid, and move up the food chain to sit at the top table on any building project.” But Hall also posed a question: “The challenge for us is, are we ready for it? Are we up to it?”

Bob Hall has long been an advocate of apprentice training at his firm Southern Electric Contracting, not least because it provided the future managers of his business. With the major m&e contractors largely turning their backs on apprentice training and the old electricity boards long gone, “where are the future technicians, engineers, designers, quantity surveyors and managers coming from if not from the ‘seed corn’ of trained craftsmen? That is where the skill shortage is really going to hit us, and I wonder if we are even recognising it, yet alone doing enough about it,” said Hall. He admits that the solution is not simple. “We need something different, something more. It may even need a fundamental change in how we approach 14-19 year olds’ education and training.”

SummitSkills, the sector skills council for building services, is the body that is charged with assessing whether the industry’s current training provision is sufficient to meet market demands. Dr Mike Hammond, research manager at SummitSkills, outlined findings from the Horizon project, which is working towards a sector skills agreement for building services that will put employers in control of training.

Where are the technicians, engineers and managers coming from if not the ‘seed corn’ of trained craftsmen

Looking at sustainability issues, 75% of respondents were engaged in installation of environmental technologies, yet only 44% thought they had the necessary skills to do the job. Hammond gave the example of the CIS building in Manchester where huge photovoltaic panels are being installed by German contractors to highlight the threat from more skilled overseas workers. “Given our Kyoto targets, buildings will be plastered with these technologies,” pointed out Hammond. An absence of current and future skills planning makes the sector reactive to emerging technologies such as renewable energies rather than proactive, resulting in a weakened capacity to meet future client demands.

Hammond compared the contracting sector with Leeds United, a football club that has traded on the past. In fact, the UK was third from bottom in terms of productivity, ahead of only Ireland and Italy in Europe. Yet, how can the industry improve when it doesn’t even know what its strengths and weaknesses are? “KPI clubs have been around since 1998, but too many do nothing and only 13% engage in formalised benchmarking,” said Hammond.

ECA director David Pollock also issued a warning to the audience in the entertaining form of a conversation with the HAL 9000 super-computer from Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He believes that the sustainable solutions being sought by clients will offer m&e contractors an exciting odyssey of their own. “Can we break away from the gravity of tradition and launch ourselves successfully into a future market place as a joined up industry? Because I believe that, if we do not, we risk being drawn into a black hole where major building services engineering companies as we know them could cease to exist, and smaller companies suffer too.”

The theme of tackling the sustainability agenda as a joined up industry was central to the conference. “To pursue our odyssey successfully, associations need to work on a joint electrical and mechanical basis, integrating our industry not only vertically in the electrical supply chain but horizontally across building services too,” said Pollock. “If we don’t do that we will be unable to deliver for m&e companies and crucially, we will miss the chance to give a better deal to the single discipline companies that make up the majority of our memberships. We will have failed as a joined-up industry.”

Kpi clubs have been around since 1998 but too many do nothing and only 13% engage in formalised benchmarking

In the Netherlands, it was the energy saving agenda that prompted trade associations to merge five years ago, “a pregnant possibility in the UK,” according to Pollock. “The mergers of electrical and mechanical organisations in more than one European country have faltered or run into unforeseen problems. It would not be difficult to find sufficient examples of problems with convergence to scare us into staying within our comfort zone. But let’s not do that. I think we should recognise that there is more that binds us than separates us, and that our mission is best achieved co-operatively.”

Of course, there are many ECA members who have heard all this before; indeed, how many convergence committees can two associations have over the years? Yet Pollock feels that the time is now right. “This is not the first time convergence has been on the agenda, but I sense that, largely thanks to the sustainability agenda, there is now a greater probability of effective co-operation than ever before.”

If the main speakers had outlined the challenges and opportunities facing the sector, it was left to the audience to come up with the action plan in the workshop sessions (see box). Perhaps one action point should be for each delegate to offset the 0.61 tonnes of CO2 generated by flying to the conference.