Multinationals will create their own construction universities in a bid to produce the business-savvy postgrads the industry craves.
There is only one thing that will bring a step change in construction, says Dennis Lenard, the head of Constructing Excellence. And that's education. We're not talking about construction management degrees because what people study at undergraduate level is almost irrelevant. What has to change drastically is postgraduate education.

Lenard, a professor himself, has worked in academia and industry in Australia where he says the two are more closely intertwined. He predicts that in ten years' time, the big multinational construction firms will have formed their own universities to create the right sorts of people to manage their business.

"Companies today require people with a great deal of business acumen, who can manage people," says Lenard. "They need to know about finance and to think about feasibility and investment; delivering value to the client. I don't believe our universities are responding to the challenge quick enough."

The lecturers at these 'construction universities' will be practitioners, says Lenard, drawing a comparison with medicine. "A lot of best-practice knowledge is sitting dormant in the companies, not being practiced." He says that the current situation where 'visiting professors' from industry lecture at university courses is a token effort.

There are precedents for industry-run universities in other sectors, set up for a firm's employees and, sometimes, its supply chain. The longest established is Hamburger University in Illinois where McDonald's managers have been learning about the fast-food business since 1961. In the UK, firms such as Unipart, Lloyds TSB and British Telecom have their own 'corporate universities' where training and education are aligned with the firm's strategies.

Corporate universities are not universities as we know them, their definition is a system whereby training and education of a firm's employees is aligned to its business strategies. There is, for example, the Styles & Wood Academy, set up just over a year ago in conjunction with Manchester Business School. The idea for the academy came through staff feedback forms wanting more personal development, says Styles & Wood chairman Gerard Quiligotti, but it made sense for the business, too. "We recognised that people had to be able to make more of an intellectual contribution to the challenges set by our clients," says Quiligotti. " We have always been a 'doing' organisation but now we see an increasing demand for us to be a thinking organisation too."

Each of the firm's 200 staff has received at least three days of training, freeing each person up for three days was the biggest challenge. With Manchester Business School, the firm created four modules, aimed at different levels of staff. They have modified the content for the second year: "We have aligned the modules far more closely to the demands we are receiving from the marketplace," says Quiligotti, for example how to work in frameworks has moved up the agenda.

Live knowledge
There are plenty of other examples of contractors teaming up with business schools in a bid to turn their managers into strategic thinkers. Take HBG which works with Roffey Park (read about this on page 36). MBAs in Construction are also starting to emerge; for example the one offered at Reading University.

The value of live industry knowledge is demonstrated by the experience of pan-discipline group Be (Collaborating for the Built Environment). In 1999 it set up a course with Henley Management College to deliver MBA-style education for young managers from a number of member firms (see CM, March 2003). The first set of people graduated last year, but there aren't any students doing it currently, due to lack of demand. This is partly due to the cost, £12,000, says Be chief executive Don Ward. But it is also an issue of content. "The 12 people who did the course said they got the most value from the tailored stuff on collaborative working that came from the industry," says Ward.

Now Be is working on a model that has been trialled by Mace, Wates, Gleeson and Costain (CM, July/August 2003). Developed by a firm called ICOM, the model divides employees into five levels of management from site engineers and the like at level one right up to board members at the top. The focus is on solving strategic problems within a company so that both the firm and the individual can develop. Other parts of the supply chain – specialist contractors, clients, designers – can also be involved in the process.

Best practice knowledge is sitting dormant in companies, not being used

Dennis Lenard

Be is going to ask its member firms to tell them about good courses which can plug into each level. "The idea is that it becomes a training map for the industry," says Ward. At the moment it's almost impossible to find out what postgraduate courses are out there.

When you start to dig around, it seems that Lenard's assertions that Universities are sluggish in their response to change isn't entirely fair. David Gann, professor of technology and innovation at Imperial College London's business school, says that integration between academia and industry has improved hugely over the last decade. And if some universities aren't changing that is a reflection of the sector they serve. "You've got an industry which is not changing fast enough, but then there are some parts of it at the leading edge. You've got an education system which is mirroring that in some ways."

There are universities that are at the leading edge, striving to collaborate and change with the industry. Take the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment course at Cambridge, set up ten years ago with help from the Arup Foundation after an industry conference identified that greater integration between the various professions would be needed in the future.

They were right. Integration is the rallying call everywhere, contractors are crying out for design managers who can speak the language of the architect and consultant, but despite that the course isn't oversubscribed as you might expect, attracting between 13 to 16 people every year. Course director Paul Kirby hopes that with the explosion of PFI and framework agreements, the time is right for expansion now.

Loughborough is running a four-year Doctor of Engineering degree (EngD) at its Centre for Innnovative Construction Engineering. Students work on projects to come up with new ways of working, new applications or marketable ideas for the sponsoring firm's business.

Innovative thinking
At Reading an MSc in cost consulting which educates non-cognates recruited by cost consulting firms such as Davis Langdon Everest and Gardiner & Theobald is in its fourth year and taking its maximum of 20 people. Programme director Keith Hutchinson says that at least 25% and sometimes 50% of each module is delivered by people working in the industry. Reading tries to retain flexibility while still meeting the requirements for the route to RICS membership.

Reading set it up because the numbers of students on built environment courses have dropped and there weren't enough high calibre graduates to go round. The CIOB is piloting its postgraduate diploma for non-cognates for the same reason. Reading hopes to launch a programme similar to the cost consultancy one for construction management.

There are other examples of innovative thinking from universities, but in some cases the courses aren't full, or they are dominated by overseas students. Why aren't UK construction companies taking them up?

There are no simplistic answers, says Gann. He makes the point that some construction firms are not equipped intellectually to make the most of some of the universities, particularly when it comes to leading-edge research. "You need people in the industry who have got the capability and foresight to see ahead."