Stepping up

NHS Estates recently placed a job advertisement for the role of ‘associate director (facilities)’. The salary was £60,000 a year and the key requirements were a recognised post-graduate qualification and five years’ experience.

Facilities management has come a long way from its old public image of tinkering with the air conditioning. Since the recession of the early 1990s, and especially since the private finance initiative was launched, the field has been edging closer to the boardroom, and is also being seen as a genuine source of added value. Which is why employers want formal qualifications, and facilities managers are turning to training to improve their performance and progress their careers.

Martin Davies, the new director of training at the British Institute of Facilities Management, sums it up well. He says: ‘I’ve seen people who’ve found their way into facilities management from an administrative background, and the next thing is that they are dumped with responsibility for a property portfolio and are making huge strategic decisions.’ He adds: ‘This has serious core-business bottom line effects.’

BIFM has recently reviewed its training and qualification structure after extensive research. Its emphasis has always, says Davies, been on practical courses to help people do their jobs, and this will continue. BIFM has identified 20 core competencies to place at the heart of its professional qualification (see panel). But it has also introduced new elements to its short courses. There is now a one-day course available on environmental issues for facilities management, an area that ‘is increasingly recognised as important,’ says Davies.

Eric Kemp, regional facilities manager at Computer Associates and David Lander, head of engineering at London City Airport, agree on another topic of crucial importance: health and safety. ‘It’s about knowing where you are and understanding changes in legislation,’ says Lander. In the UK, says Kemp, health and safety is now the number one issue.

But emerging topics are only part of the story. Jane Bell, who founded Catalyst Management Development with former BIFM director general John Crawshaw, says that in facilities management’s early years: ‘There was a huge emphasis on technical skills, such as engineering or property. Over time people issues have emerged.’ She believes this stems both from the recognition that people are the main business asset and from changes in work patterns, with people more willing to change jobs. ‘From a training point of view, first and foremost people have to be good managers,’ she says.

Bell also identifies another emerging trend. Because companies are seeking to extract added value from their assets they are recognising that a major proportion – perhaps 90 per cent – of the costs of a facility come after the initial set up. This brings procurement skills to the fore. A slight shift in the balance of skills is needed, says Bell, with less emphasis on day-to-day issues and more about procurement planning.

Professor If Price, co-director of Sheffield Hallam University’s facilities management graduate centre (FMGC), says: ‘It’s about whole life value of delivery, rather than annual budgets.’

Just as the kind of skills required is constantly evolving, so also are the areas in which they are being deployed. Kemp, a graduate of Reading’s College of Estate Management, identifies two key requirements. ‘There is more and more need to get a view on Europe as a whole,’ he says. When training on the property portfolio, it is important to see it in the pan-European context. This is not too surprising, given that transnationals have been at the vanguard of developing facilities management.

But a more surprising requirement stems from a different school of management thinking; branding. ‘We’re making sure you get a standard experience,’ Kemp say. He cites the training that receptionists at Computer Associates receive to ensure telephone callers encounter a ‘consistent experience’ across buildings housing between 20 and 500 staff. ‘It’s quite a challenge,’ he says.

‘You have to understand the core business,’ says Kemp. ‘One negative visit can detract from the rest of the day.’ He says an external contractor would be ‘shot to pieces’ if it didn’t give consistent service. ‘There’s no reason why an in-house team should be any different,’ he says.

Keeping abreast of new developments in relevant areas and ensuring facilities staff deploy their skills appropriately are undeniably important for facilities management training. Both, however, deal with horizontal functions.

Almost certainly the biggest challenge facing facilities managers is moving the field vertically. Lynda Hinxman, co-director of Sheffield Hallam FMGC, says it is about moving from the boiler room to the boardroom. ‘If we want to move the profession forward we have to make an impact at board level,’ she says. ‘To do that,’ she adds, ‘help people get competence to speak at that level in the language they [the board] understand.’

Price adds that this means speaking in terms of profit and value added, rather than budget and cost. His three year postgraduate course at Sheffield Hallam University starts with the core skills like health and safety, environmental awareness, risk assessment and real estate asset management. The second year becomes highly practical, with real life case studies. But the final year is about strategy. ‘It’s about leadership, strategy and holistic thinking,’ says Price.

At BIFM, Davies says: ‘It is clear more people are climbing up the ladder.’ But Bell is more cautious: ‘The real need is for facilities management to get more skilled in other branches of support services. They must be at the forefront of information technology and human resources or they will lose out. There is a danger that facilities management is seen as too narrow and technical, but there is a huge amount it can contribute.’