If your qualifications don’t quite measure up to your ambition, the recession could be the perfect opportunity to get your career in alignment.

You’re an experienced site manager, with dozens of successful residential projects under your belt, but nothing is on the immediate horizon. Do you:

a) Desperately fire out your CV to all and sundry

b) Sit back and wait for redundancy

c) Reskill as a project manager and get a job in another sector

If option c) sounds attractive, but a little daunting, there’s good news for you. Higher education providers are being asked to become more flexible, either in the way they assess candidates, how the courses they offer are delivered, or in the type of courses on offer.

A conference held in January in London, attended by representatives of the education sector, the construction industry and government skills organisation ConstructionSkills, addressed how higher education could meet construction employers’ needs in the recession. At the event, higher education minister David Lammy called for short, relevant courses that would ‘recalibrate’ individuals so they could move to another built environment sector.

‘Recalibration is a refined form of reskilling,’ explains Kath Galloway, a consultant to ConstructionSkills. ‘It would be tuned to individual cases to take a person most quickly into a different area of construction or the built environment.’

David Cracknell, director of lifelong learning at the Construction Industry Council, is looking forward to a new era of flexible courses that will allow rapid recalibration. ‘We are hoping higher education establishments will be more open to looking at the needs of mature students. The rigid patterns of learning we have been used to are outdated. The workforce has to be flexible and moveable and education and training providers will need to be too.’

Although enrolling on – and paying for – a university course may not feel like the obvious response to redundancy or a slack spell at work, it could provide an opportunity to rethink your career, and at the very least will refresh your CV. ‘Not only will you gain more skills, but you can show an employer that you haven’t wasted that time,’ advises Peter Ramsay-Dawber, academic team leader for construction at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). He also suggests that it may be a good time to put in your application for full CIOB membership, and recently held two seminars to take people through the process.

One option may be to recalibrate yourself as a specialist. Design management is a growing field, although currently Northumbria University offers the only undergraduate degree in this, along with a part-time option. Alternatively, dispute resolution is definitely an area that won’t suffer in a recession. Last year the University of Salford launched an MA in Construction Law and Practice which can be studied by distance learning over two years. It’s already proving popular, with 40 students on its first intake.

If you are a construction manager and are thinking of recalibrating as a bid team leader, Nottingham Trent’s Ramsay-Dawber suggests looking at an MSc in project management to broaden your understanding of the whole construction process.

If you’re not sure which course to go for, Milan Radosljevic, a lecturer and course director at Reading University, points out that construction is desperate for skilled and qualified managers at all levels. He advises: ‘Go for courses designed to challenge commonly accepted wisdom and open your mind, and not merely the ones that deliver outdated knowledge.’

Edward Simpson, who lectures at the University of Abertay in Dundee and is an SQA External Verifier for Construction and a CIOB ambassador, advises any would-be students to take a good hard look at their local market and work out what skills will be in greatest demand a few years down the line. For example, he says that in Scotland quantity surveyors and civil engineers are always thin on the ground.

But if you are not willing – or able – to commit to two or more years of study, universities are starting to offer the sort of short courses required for rapid recalibration, many of which are delivered flexibly so that people can work and study at the same time. The College of Estate Management (CEM) in Reading, for example, has developed its Framework for Lifelong Learning where it serves up ‘bite-sized pieces’ of its degree programmes to companies or individuals, priced accordingly.

Many universities – including Leeds Metropolitan and Northumbria – allow students to take individual modules as part of their CPD. At Nottingham Trent University, students who don’t meet the criteria to study for an MSc in project management can work through the programme module by module, gaining CPD credits as they go and upgrading to the full Masters qualification if appropriate.

If you do not have a first degree, Leeds Metropolitan offers an honours degree in project management, delivered on Sundays. The broad-based course is considered ideal for people looking to switch sectors, for instance from IT project management to construction or vice versa, or from contracting to client-side roles. ‘The NHS is desperate to take students with project management qualifications,’ says Ann-Marie Sanderson, the university’s group head of construction and project management. She says roles are available in project support offices, which run NHS capital projects including construction and general procurement.

For those with the self-discipline to study a course by distance learning, Reading’s CEM has plenty on offer. CIOB accredited courses include BSc (Hons) in Construction Management, BSc (Hons) in Building Surveying, BSc (Hons) in Quantity Surveying and an MBA. Or you could try an MSc or a diploma in surveying practice.

Despite the recession, remember that the industry constantly needs a fresh supply of well-trained professionals. The latest ConstructionSkills Network forecasts show that the industry will need 3,460 new construction managers a year between 2009 and 2013, 1,150 new surveyors and 9,350 other professional services personnel.

The flip side is that undergraduate numbers are set to fall between 2009 and 2019 due to declining birth rates. As there’s also likely to be reduced take-up of part-time university places due to the lack of employer-sponsorship in the recession, both the industry and universities desperately need to attract more mature students.

In the last recession, construction lost many people to completely different sectors and suffered the consequences of a missing generation of manager. Those who can make the most of quieter times by recalibrating now could reap the benefits in a few years. cm

Recalibrating 40 years’ experience for the next decade

Having recently completed a construction management degree, experienced estimator Barry Hill (pictured) was intending to take a break from study for a while. But when the credit crunch started to bite into the recruitment market, he decided to use the slowdown to his advantage and embarked on a MSc in project management at Reading University.

Colleagues have been teasing Hill over his decision to put more letters after his name, asking ‘what can they possibly teach you?’ After all, he has more than 40 years’ experience in the building and civil engineering sectors, most recently in estimating and project co-ordination on complex rail jobs in London. He has worked as a freelancer since returning to the UK in 1985 from spells in Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Bahrain.

But Hill sees the qualification in project management as a way of affirming the expertise he has gained through on-the-job experience over the years. ‘Forty years ago, it was more about multi-tasking. When I was on rail projects, I could do the job of most people round the table. Now it’s all about being a specialist. You have to demonstrate you have reached a certain level.’

The MSc will take two years to complete, involving eight modules each taught in week-long sessions at the university. For Hill, who is married with a grown-up daughter, finding the time is not an issue, as he has always worked plenty of hours. ‘If I’m working full-time and studying, it’s probably 60 to 80 hours a week,’ he says.

Although 60, Hill is not planning to retire any time soon. ‘I don’t see any reason why I should retire at 70, let alone 65,’ he says.

The MSc is a way of ensuring he keeps getting the jobs in the coming years. ‘When you are self-employed and working on a contract basis, it gives the whole thing more credibility if you are qualified.’

Barry Hill is a self-employed estimator and project manager

Source

Construction Manager