CIOB announces winners of its seventh Global Student Challenge

A team from Toronto has been announced as the winner of the seventh annual Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) Global Student Challenge competition, after facing a fiercely competitive international field. The winners are DGC Toronto, a team of four final-year students studying for the Honours Bachelor of Technology (Construction Management) at George Brown College, a university which also made it to the 2019 finals.

The award was collected virtually due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. However, this did not impact the incredible efforts made by each team, the standard of which has been just as strong as previous years.

The winning team receives £2000 in prize money, along with access to a unique mentoring programme, with industry leaders offering advice and guidance to support their professional development.

More than 50 international teams entered this year’s competition before the top 6 best performing competitors were chosen to go through to the final.

The other finalists were:

·       CIOBNB – Chongqing University

·       Base Build – RMIT University

·       Skywalker Construction – Hong Kong Polytechnic University

·       Sang Neggala – Universitas Indonesia

·       Glasgow Construction Corp. – Glasgow Caledonian University

Mark Beard, President of the CIOB, said:

“This is a challenge not for the faint hearted. All the teams have shown their ability and potential by reaching these finals. As students you will now have a greater sense of what it is like to work in a construction company making high-level decisions. I have no doubt that all of our finalists will be able to reach that level when they leave university.”

The CIOB’s annual Global Student Challenge, which is open to full time students, is a real test of construction industry know-how, taking place in stages over a number of months. The competition provides a realistic simulation where teams, made up of three or four people, act as a Board of Directors running their own company.

Teams from universities all over the world entered the 2020 competition, and normally the six teams scoring the most in the early stages would be invited to the finals, held as part of the CIOB’s annual Member’s Forum, which was a virtual event this year

Entry for the 2021 challenge will open later this year. Find out more about the Global Student Challenge here.