Construction goes to e-school

The much-heralded advent of buying building materials or tendering online is a fiction of epic proportions for most managers. And unless you work for a top 20 contractor on one of its most prestigious schemes, even electronic document management is just a head-office buzzword.

But all that is about to change. Webucation is here and it will change the way you work. You don't need a high-specification computer linked to an encrypted, top-secret management site to benefit from it. All you need is a standard home-use PC with modem (at least 35% of households now have a PC with modem), and everyone is welcome.

Webucation
Webucation is the latest phrase to describe online learning. And the construction industry is taking its first tentative steps to replace face-to-face instruction with distance learning through your PC's internet browser.

This month, the Construction Industry Training Board is launching a website that will provide construction managers and those who are "on the tools" with learning modules. Using these modules, you can improve your skills without having to take time off from work to attend a course at head office, and you can do it all in your spare time or, because the modules are designed to be used in bite-sized chunks, during a break at work.

www.learndirect.co.uk
For the first couple of months, explains CITB project manager Les Greenacre, the web site will provide links to www.learndirect.co.uk and to information sources such as the Construction Industry Best Practice Programme. The learndirect site is a general online learning site that provides learning modules for students in education and business. Set up by the government, learndirect is linked to local education centres in towns and cities, and can provide construction managers with basic financial and management training, says Greenacre.

Greenacre adds that the CITB site, which will be called the Construction Industry Learning Network, will provide construction-related training modules later in the spring. Greenacre says that the first one is likely to be a health and safety module that will be ready in April.

While the internet provides opportunities to present material in a dynamic and interactive way with animation, audio feeds and even video feeds, the CITB's first module will be a simple copy of one of its existing paper-based modules.

But this is not the limit of the CITB's Unipart-designed site, says Greenacre. Contractors such as Carillion and Shepherd will be providing training modules on a region-by-region basis, he adds. For instance, Wolverhampton-based Carillion will be providing training modules in response to demand from the West Midlands branch of the CITB, says Greenacre, while York-based Shepherd will do the same for the Yorkshire area. The CITB is also in negotiations with Pearson Education (the education supply arm of the Pearson empire that owns the Financial Times and Channel Five) to produce an online master of business administration course.

Carillion aims to be doing 50% of its training through the internet by the middle of the decade, according to Alison Hunt, manager of the company's Learning Works division. "E-learning is the ideal way of transferring knowledge," she says. "One area we are already looking at is improving interview skills so that we can recruit more efficiently," says Hunt. "We can create a module that gives a structure to interviews and example questions." Hunt is also developing a course tackling the new competition act and its implications for construction. "We can provide a course with a bank of random questions at the end, so that the candidates can test themselves," she says. The course can be updated when case law changes, and managers will be asked to keep themselves updated every six months, says Hunt. "We can easily monitor whether they are doing this or not," she adds.

In the next year or so, Hunt expects 20-30% of all Carillion's training to be done online, and this will rise to 50% by the middle of the decade.

Work at your own pace
The great advantage for training managers on the net, explains Hunt, is that they can do it at their own pace or just dip into the parts they need. "Once undertaken, the training module will always be available on the company's intranet so that it can be referred to," she says.

But it's not only managers who will benefit. Subcontractors are also in Carillion's sights. Hunt explains that training modules on topics like supply chain management will be available for subcontractors, and it will be a requirement within some contracts for subcontractors to take the course.

Hunt is cagey about whether Carillion will be charging for the training. She says the courses are expensive to produce because of all the hours of research that have to be put in. "Then all the architecture behind the on-screen navigation has to be tested and the presentation has to be designed," says Hunt. "Will we charge? Well, it will probably depend on who our partners are," she adds.