Last month six construction innovators pitched their ideas in the dotBE den at the Construction Innovation Summit. Dwight Wilson, digital engineering manager at Imtech Engineering Services, explains his winning innovation, the careers mapping project.
What is the careers mapping project?
The careers mapping project is an exercise in analysing the career paths of construction industry professionals. It was kicked off by individuals drawing paths between time in education and roles inside and outside of industry at the dotBE stand at DCW 2015.
By doing this we hoped to demonstrate the importance of the T-shaped professional and life-long learning within the industry, something that has long been recognised in the tech industry.
By gathering this information we could also demonstrate the diverse routes to progression in industry as well the diverse skill set.
Dwight Wilson
The idea presented at CIS was a digitised cloud-based version of the exercise so far. This would enable additional data to be added to the nodes and pathways to create trends and analysis that would turn this into a tool that could inform employers of the skill sets typically required for job roles and suggest potential industry roles for those interested based on their particular skill set.
What problem does the project solve?
The career mapping is not aimed at solving a problem on its own, it is meant to aggregate and visualise the data that represents the diverse skill sets within construction as well as the non-linear routes of progression throughout the industry.
This should highlight trends within speed of progression and where the digital roles have evolved from. As well as the not-so-often explored training and education that have enabled the progression.
With this platform in place other applications can be built to drill into this data set and make recommendations to education providers, individuals and employers on training, future job roles and core competencies required to deliver certain roles.
This will hopefully bring light to where the actual skill gap resides and identify non-linear employment and education methods to fulfil this gap.
How will this be useful to those working in construction?
For those working in construction it is an opportunity to see the potential progression routes as well as the education, both formal and informal, these routes created.
Were you surprised to win?
Yes, I didn’t think this particular idea was as innovative as others presented – Hack_Construct and Level2Live in particular were great examples of how the use of technology can have an impact right now through hyper online collaboration and hackathons respectively.
What is the next step for the project?
In the short term I plan to present this as a challenge at a series of upcoming hackathons to see how close to a minimum viable product can be achieved. I’ll also be appealing to anyone interested in developing the project to get in contact with dotBe as I hope to release a beta version in early 2017.
With this platform in place other applications can be built to drill into this data set and make recommendations to education providers, individuals and employers on training, future job roles and core competencies required to deliver certain roles.– Dwight Wilson
