My Construction Industry Focus - Bridging the Gap
As a professional, I have been a part of the building industry for about four plus decades, working in the Americas, Asia and to some extent, in Europe.
My chartered status at CIOB came about in a very unusual manner where I was sponsored – without my knowledge – after I left New York to take on the project of planning and building a technical university campus for women in Asia. To my pleasant surprise I was inducted into the Fellowship by then CIOB President and Chairman in California at the National Conference on Construction Management Association of America. This was also when a project I was working on – to develop a mutual agreement between CMAA (Construction Management Association of America) and CIOB (Chartered Institute of Building) to work with each other across the pond – came to fruition.
As a licensed architect in the United States with AIA for quarter of a century, a chartered architect of RIBA and a chartered construction manager at CIOB for over a decade, I have always been keen on sharing our knowledge platform of the built environment with the future generation of designers, builders and construction project managers. As our industry, especially the management aspect of it, got more and more into the spotlight of professionalism, I often worried that the gap between the industry and academia that prepared our next leaders, doers and deliverers for building and infrastructure projects was rather wide. Although the academics did their best to instill the real world problems and solutions in the classrooms, the connection between the practical and the theoretical was a weak link. Therefore, I made it my mission to get involved in institutes, colleges, universities and even high schools, to mentor young people – to get them excited about the construction industry and to get them intoxicated about the idea of having a part in creating new structures, infrastructures and new environments. I would take on any invites to speak as a guest even if it meant needing to reschedule my routines and my personal times.
Over the years, while guest lecturing undergraduate and graduate students at Architecture, Engineering and Construction Management classrooms, at symposiums, forums and conferences, explaining the importance of being certified, licensed and chartered to establish oneself as a professional in the industry, I was ecstatic to have found many like-minded colleagues, comrades and collaborators who felt the same way and were dedicated to spending a chunk of their time mentoring, training and teaching the aspiring young professionals and students. We were a band of construction industry professionals from across the globe – from China to South America, from South Africa to Scandinavia and all that in between – always jumping at the first opportunity to connect with the next generation of us – to help them be better than us – by telling them our stories, our experiences and our failures and our successes.
I have spent years collaborating with many exceptional individuals in the industry such as the late Shirong Li of Chongqing through the UN ITC and the Chartered Institute of Building to train women for the construction industry. Louis Gunnigan at DIT Dublin and Palmina Whelan at American Airlines advocating alternate project delivery, with Noreen Hollywood and Ariane Dens – the leadings ladies of CIOB in the Middle East championing equality, equity and inclusion. Tess Mateo on global green inclusive innovation platform at the United Nations, with Pirjo Honkaniemi connecting US construction expertise to Finnish construction industry and academia, and with a host of colleagues at the Construction Management Association in North America creating exchange platforms internationally among organizations, institutes and government to recognize license, charter and certification as a cornerstone of the industry. In all these efforts, I have never let go of my determination and desire to bring all that my years of experience in the industry taught me to the forefront of the next generation of professionals. To that end, in addition to my day job, I am at present an associate faculty teaching construction management and project management at the PRATT Institute in New York, a visiting lecturer at the Tomas Bata University and Prague Technical University in the Czech Republic.
Education in our industry is paramount in producing capable and innovative construction managers who are professional, knowledgeable and ethical. But the classroom theories are not enough to provide them with the tools they need to face the real world. Hence more and more universities are involving practicing industry professionals in their course programs to narrow that gap. University department chairs, deans and provosts at various technical universities in the US and Europe I liaise with are increasingly taking steps to integrate academia with the industry of which I am fully supportive of and wish that we would see a lot more of it globally in the near future.