A tough french test

Here’s an idea: instead of bemoaning construction’s poor image, why not do something about it? That was French contractor Bouygue’s approach 10 years ago when there was a shortage of good graduates in France.

The contractor hatched a plan to pit the best students from the best institutes against each other in a tough engineering challenge. Known as the ‘Defi Bouygues’ (defi is French for challenge), the event now attracts national press coverage and acts as a recruitment vehicle for the firm.

For the first time, to celebrate the 10th competition, Bouygues’ UK arm sent a team along. In selecting its team – three from UCL and three non-construction students from Manchester Business School – the idea was that the UK business could potentially recruit some top students, while spreading the word about the good name of Bouygue.

The Defi was tough. Having arrived at a beautiful French chateau the evening before, the students’ breakfasts were interrupted with a brief and blunt description of the challenge: choose between a bridge, tunnel and road to ease traffic congestion in an imaginary city. Each team then went to a room equipped with IT, various software programmes and four big folders of information.

‘We thought “Oh my God”,’ recalls Huw Riley, one of the UCL students in his final year of a Project Management for Construction degree. ‘The first thing we had to do was use some transport modelling software which we had to work out how to use by trial and error. Everyone was panicking.’

Over the course of the next 36 hours (with just an hour’s sleep) the six had to select their option, plan and programme it, produce a bill of quantities with costs, analyse the risks and look at the economic and ecological impacts.

The ordeal finished with two presentations: one on the risks to the company to the Bouygues’ board and a second to the imaginary clients.

‘It was a great experience to test your endurance,’ says Riley. The experience also changed his impression of Bouygues. He would never have thought of applying to a big French firm, especially as he does not speak French.

But Riley was impressed by the attention which the Bouygue board showed the students during the competition and at the evening gathering after the event. ‘We proved ourselves to them without having worked for them. And they proved themselves to us.’

And how did the British team perform? Well, despite French fears that the UK students would be inferior (Bouygue’s head office even asked to check CVs to make sure they were up to scratch), the UK team came an impressive second out of eight teams, of which five were French.