Welcome to the BIMTech Podcast. In this episode BIMTech Engineering got the opportunity to host the Team Selection Event for WorldSkillsUK and also sit down with WorldSkillsUK's Chief Expert of Digital Engineering, Michael McGuire to explore WorldSkills and it's effect on education and the construction industry. Michael gives us an insight into the event as well as WorldSkills as a whole! This and more on Episode 4 of the BIMTech Podcast. Enjoy!
Welcome to the BIMTech Podcast. In this episode BIMTech Engineering got the opportunity to host the Team Selection Event for WorldSkillsUK and also sit down with WorldSkillsUK's Chief Expert of Digital Engineering, Michael McGuire to explore WorldSkills and it's effect on education and the construction industry. Michael gives us an insight into the event as well as WorldSkills as a whole! This and more on Episode 4 of the BIMTech Podcast. Enjoy!
So on this, beautiful spring morning in Manchester. What better way to spend it than to sit in an office and do a podcast. So this morning, we're fortunate enough to have Michael McGuire with us. No relation, by the way. I always have to put that caveat in. Same. So Michael is a lecturer in digital construction at Caledonian Glasgow University. And he's also the chief expert for digital engineering for UK World skills. Well, world wide skills. And like I say, we're fortunate to have him here today. So... Thank you very much for the invite. It's been fantastic coming down. And following what you do on social media, LinkedIn, and we've met a couple of times in Glasgow. It's actually nice to see the cave. And see the podcast area as well that I've been watching. Yeah, it looks a bit smaller in real life than it possibly does... It’s perfect....on screen. But yeah, it does the job. so I guess that's kind of the introduction, unless there's more you want to say about who you are? Yeah. Michael McGuire, I've been an educator for 22 years. So further education, through New College Lanarkshire. And it's always like architectural technology but computer focused, always aligned very heavily to what industry do. And a year and a half ago, I moved to Glasgow Caledonian University. Quite interesting, we're looking at courses now that are not specifically digital construction, but bringing digital construction into them. So quantity surveying, construction project management, etc.. But yeah, before that I was a steel fabricator for 12 years. So it's nice to have a kind of mixture of both. Actually knowing the industry side and then moving into the education side. But yeah. And the world skills bits then. Can you explain a little bit to people what world skills is. Because I'll be honest, until I met you, what was it, maybe 4 or 5 years ago? Something like that. I didn't even know it existed, and I didn't know anything about it. I don't think it gets the publicity that it probably should. Yeah. And, I find that hard as somebody who's in it, most people who take part, either educators, students, companies, the people that work in the background as well, those that take part, it becomes all consuming. It becomes a massive part of your life, your career, your private life as well. Your time. Don't be trying to put people off here. No, no, no, no, it becomes a massive part because it's enjoyable. Yeah, good. It's one of the things for me of, I look at what I do in industry and we look at what we do in education, and it's a nice little sandwich in between the two. It's a good way to actually link industry to education as well. And then if you think about competition, look at competitions like Formula 1, how it's actually driven, the innovation, if you like, in the development of motorsport. And then a lot of that feeds back into the industry. KERS for example, hybrid engines, sequential gearboxes, they were all developed through motorsport, through people trying to innovate tenths of a second or hundredths of a second advantage over others. And then that finds its way back into mainstream, world skills is trying to do a similar thing, but for education. Wow! So let's try and find a better way to teach something through an international best practice. And how do we then bring that back into mainstream education in the UK? And do you think it's then important that you sort of sit on both sides of it, that you're in the world skills, but you're also, like you say, you're an educator. So do you feel like you need to be on both sides? No, I'm in quite a very privileged position. I do get that. I work with a lot educators that are in colleges and universities, that they work then, if you like, with their own students. I'm trying to support as many educators as possible and students as possible. Ultimately, I have a couple of roles with world skills. One is looking at a national competition, where there is no age limit. We are just purely looking for students that are either currently studying a digital construction course, or they maybe just recently graduated last year, for example, and working in a practice, and they’re a trainee. We're looking to catch those people and then give them some training and test their ability and benchmark them against other students and trainees in the UK. And that kind of culminates with a national qualifier in June, and then that's open to everybody that meets a benchmark. So every single student can participate. And then from that, the top eight students would progress to a national final. And again, it's using things that students already probably know. Revit, Navisworks, Autodesk Construction cloud, a BIM Execution Plan, naming conventions, working to standards. And if they don't know it because it's not in their course, then we support them with that. The educators and the students and give them the training that they’re looking for that maybe bridge that gap. If they are young enough because internationally there's an age limit for us of 25. So you're not allowed to be older than 25 to compete. Then after the national final, we invite the best top scoring three young people to join, what we call squad UK. And you're hosting them here this weekend as they compete for the very final time over two years. And then they've been training monthly, they’re competing monthly, training and competing against each other, people from overseas through things like international pressure tests, where we bring other students from overseas to us or we go and visit them and we benchmark our students vs their students. And then the whole thing culminates with a massive international competition. So right now what we are doing here, we arrived on Thursday. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they're doing a very high level test project. And the event itself is called Team selection. So from the three, only one gets to go forward. And then that one person represents the UK in Lyon this September with the rest of team UK. One is digital construction and then one for all of the other skills and there’s are approximately 68-70 skills that will be there. So it is kind of like the Olympics, isn't it, in a way. Like because in the Olympics, you have all the different events. Yeah. And in the world skills, you have all the different skills, I guess. Yeah. For me it's more realistic. I'm not great at running. Not great at throwing things or swimming. Cycling, I could never compete at that. My past experience, when I left school, I was a steel fabricator. And while I was an apprentice, I saw how competitive the other apprentices were with each other. Our educators, the people who are training us used competition to make us compete against each other. And we've all got that little, most of us, have a little element of a competitive streak. If it's even just a beam and you have to put an end plate on it. Who can do it the fastest? But also get it within the three millimeter tolerance, that type of thing. And it's nice to see how that develops and how we use those, like competition based learning methodologies if you like. And how we train and how we develop our students to just kind of excel that bit. Yeah. And do you find like the industry gets engaged enough? Do you find that it's just certain companies or do you find it’s quite a wide range of companies who like to get involved and support it? In a range of skills it’s quite wide ranging. In this one specifically, it's quite a narrow range. It's people that I know personally. Yeah. And most of them follow me on LinkedIn as you see me on LinkedIn. People who follow me on LinkedIn see I post about it quite regularly and then I post like the opening ceremony is just spectacular. It looks like the Olympics, but for real skills. So digital construction, bricklaying, joinery, plumbing, electrical, all of the trades take part. I quite like stone masonry and welding. I like going and watching them. But we've got hospitality, floristry, hairdressing, that sides also covered. Yeah. So it's very wide ranging. So the companies all get involved then through that. With me, the companies that get involved are typically companies and people like yourself that I know, who’ll support us with things like hosting, for example. We're looking for places to train. Also sponsorship as well. Quite often we're looking for sponsorship to allow us to do the things that we do. So the guys that are here today have turned up with a laptop bag. With a laptop in it. It's got a second screen. It's got Wi-Fi. Anywhere we go we just literally bring everything out and we are self-sufficient and we’re able to train. But I often describe it as the largest thing that people don't know about. Yeah. If you have not heard of world skills, I think it does shock people when they watch the opening ceremony and the videos. When you showed me the video the other day, and it was the first time I'd seen that, and I couldn't believe how big it was as an event. I just assumed it was something that eventually, when it got to the sort of final, it was still hosted just in like somebody's office or something. I didn't realize. Or hosted in a university. I couldn't believe it when I saw people walking into a stadium holding national flags and everything, it's... 55,000 people cheering as you walk in. 80 countries. Yeah. So 80 countries take part. Not in every single skill. So our skill, for example, is quite new. 2019 was the first time it ran as a demonstration in Kazan. And then Covid came. So it kind of paused it a little bit. We competed in Bordeaux in 2022, and it was still on the cusp of they called it a special edition. So it was still coming back from Covid and not everything was open yet. and I think we had 13 countries take part, in Lyon this year there's 24 countries registered. So we're starting to grow. So we've got lots of new countries who are coming and taking part as well. And, it's quite nice to see how those countries are starting to involve more digital construction skills in their education and BIM as well. We all talk about the ISO 19650 suite. It's at the core of the competition. So the more countries that start to evolve and take on BIM working processes and standards, they look to this as a way of plugging that gap, if you like, of where education and industry sit currently. Right. Interesting. And then with there being so many countries involved and things, I assume there's like a world ranking system. Yeah. To make it even more competitive. Yeah, absolutely. So, at the end of the test project, if you like, so four days of competition. Each competitor is awarded a point system. So you've seen the marking system that we use here, for example. So if we think a digital construction project, a 3D model or information or whatever the task might be. It's analyzed, points are awarded to it, and then a competitor has to win a gold, silver, bronze medal. Okay. Not only gold, silver, bronze. There’s also, if you score highly enough, so there's a benchmark score. And typically it's round about maybe halfway, just above the halfway mark, there is a medallion for excellence that's awarded. So it's the kind of benchmark of, it would be great to get something, but the 24 or so countries that are competing. They’re sending the best student in their country. Yeah. So you're competing against the best in the world. So if you achieve anything of that halfway point mark and you achieve a medallion for excellence, you get points for that. And your country gets points for that. A bronze obviously is worth more, silver and gold medal is worth more then. And then how that works is each of the countries then are ranked. How many golds did they get? How many bronzes, silvers, medallions and so on. And then a table will appear and after the last one the UK was 10th. And I think it's kind of where they look to be is in the top ten. Yeah. I think that's a pretty good benchmark for the UK. Yeah. Do you get competitiveness though within sort of the UK team? Like, do you ever get them where they go. Oh the bricklayers let us down today. They should have done better. Certainly not. It's one of the things they do really, really well. They bond. All support each other. Yeah. We get together and currently we are attending Warwick University for our team boot camps and our squad boot camps. But the training manager and the competitors. So right now we've got squad and I've got three in the squad. And when that goes to one or whether it's with squad, we go a Warwick together and we spend time together. But all skills go. So if there's approximately 70 skills that the team UK are taking part in and then all of them get together, so they all get to know each other, they all get to support each other. And actually it's really nice when, if we talk worlds, international competitions every two years and talk about Bordeaux in 2022. In between them every two years, we have continental competitions. So Europe, euro skills, for example. And we had Euro skills in Gdansk last year and Isabelle who was in team UK at that point, she won the gold medal for team UK for digital construction. She’s just sat over there in our office today. She’s just sat over there hoping to win the place to go to Lyon. So she made it into team UK for the European competition. Which was over three days instead of four. And it's seven modules. And those modules are very varied like you use Revit structure, Revit architecture, do some coordination, use ACC, use Navisworks for clash detection. We use model coordination and ACC, design collaboration and things like that, even take off, Dynamo. It's very, very varied what they're actually being asked to do. Yeah. And for the, you know, the people who compete, there’s obviously some sort of kudos with it to win and everything. But do they find that it helps them in their career as well with like... Do they get rewarded? If someone wins it, will their company recognize it and maybe give them a bit of a bonus for winning it and things like that, do you ever find? Currently, I don't know about any bonuses. Some countries maybe hold it in higher regard than the UK does. So there are some of the Asian countries where government officials also get involved. That’s not quite the same in the UK. I don't think we value education as highly in the UK as maybe we could. So in the UK it's bragging rights. Yeah. That's pretty much it. But it's great on your CV. Oh yeah. So if we look at the three that are here. Paul is working with BakerHicks and through a lot of the things that he's learned and in the projects that he's on, I'm going to just say he's not far away from if we look at promotion and moving up the scale towards senior architectural technologist, that type of thing. Yeah. Dan is with Bond Bryan and he's looking at the role he's in where he's an assistant BIM manager. He was first year in university at London South Bank University as a graduate apprentice when he joined the World Skills Program and used all the training. And it does this hockey stick thing where your level is, and it just really accelerates the level in terms of your knowledge and your skills. And then Isabelle as well, if we look at, she's just recently moved to WSP as well. And what's tend to be happening is companies see me on LinkedIn posting about it. And they see their progress. They see images of the projects that they're working on and the types of skills their doing, and then they start to speak to them. Yeah. And gauge what their level is compared to maybe their own stuff. And then it's a nice way to almost be promoted internally or look to move somewhere else for, maybe a step up in another place. And if people are watching this and they want to get involved, like, whether that's a student or it is a, I don't know, a business or anything, what's the way of best getting information and registering and interest I guess? If you Google World Skills UK, that will take you straight to the website. For me, if you Google World Skills UK digital construction, it will take you straight to our page. On there, there’s tons of information. There's also lots of free resources as well. So there are video tutorials, how to use ACC, how to use Revit, Navisworks and so on. How to, if you think about it, how to use worksets, how to collaborate with somebody. They're all there and they’re all hosted and all freely available. That's good. If as a company that you've got people that are trainees and they've just recently graduated or they're still at university, you can register them. So you can click the register button and register them directly yourself, or you can show them it and ask them to register. Right. That's really good. I know we’ve potentially got one for next year. I would say this year is quite special. So the cycle tends to work that people register now and the registration period closes on Friday, which is a 28th of March. If it's already closed, it's fine. But once it's closed, nobody else can enter, that’s it. From there, there's a couple of teams calls and some video resources that will be given. And then there's a little one hour quiz that they sit. And it's simple things like, can they use Revit to create a roof on a building? Can they open a BEP and find a project number or a location like a North thing or something like that? Yeah. So it's really basics, but it's just gonna take out anybody that really doesn't know Revit. Or they've never used a BEP, or they've never heard of a BEP, that type of thing. So that's only one hour. In June I think it's June 5th. Every single student that’s registered and met that benchmark get a one day competition. So they can sit that in their office or they can sit that in their college or their university or from home. What we ask is, so that I invigilate it, I open up a teams meeting and then on your phone or a tablet or something, we'll set up a camera so you can just observe. It's just to make sure that you're the person competing and you’re not a team helping you, right. So we invigilate that.
That's open to every student from 9:00 till 4 p.m. type thing. And then the national final happens in November. So that's typically that cycle. But at any point any student can get involved with us, they can ask for more support. Anybody from industry, any educators that are looking to get involved, even when we host things like the national final, I'd happily get you all involved. But yeah, the big thing for your competitor this year, if he registers, is that team selection because it kicks in now, and then team UK, who’s sponsored by Pearson VUE, so we're looking at them to go to Shanghai in 2026. And everything starts to all align where we've got competition based learning and we are trying to accelerate learning. The government and the UK have identified skills gaps, so between education and industry, there's not quite, let's say that not everybody coming out of education can hit the ground running. Start in a company. We’ve found that. The transition from education to everyday working, it's a bit of an eye opener for some students, like when they first come into like a working environment. Yeah. And they get involved with actual projects where you've got a task to do on a project or something, and you end up having to give them a lot of support. Yeah, what we try to do, like involving people like yourself, so we can ask you guys to write a task if you like, that type of thing. And all the tasks that I use, even the tasks that they're doing today. You've seen some of them with a big school. These are all real projects. Yeah. So we work with some really good architectural practices, structural practices and so on, that have supported us so far. There's not specifically an MEP or a services module, but equally we do use MEP through a coordination task. So they'll do lots of like clash detection or coordination, issues inspection, quality assurance. They do that type of stuff. But for us we try and get industry involved as much as possible. At the world skills international side, every two years, lots of companies from all over the world. So every country that competes in my skill are asked to nominate a couple of countries. And those countries say, this is a list of all the skills we want to assess. Right. And then the educators all look at it along with world skills and what's quite good is we did this a couple of years ago. And then it's just happened again. And the list is exactly the same as the one that was created two years ago. So the skills that the industry are looking for are currently being assessed. What it means though, is our competition is never more than two years out of date. Right. So if you think of the skills you need people who were brand new, if you were employing them straight away, here's the skills you want them to have. Most of that's probably on that list. Every two years there’s a refresh button. Completely refreshed, completely re-written. So it's never, especially in our industry, you look how quickly it's moved in the past 5-10 years. Yeah. The technical side of things. Just... Yeah. It's unbelievable how fast it moves. Yeah. And as an educator, I've always found that a challenge. If you're writing a curriculum that's going to sit on a shelf for 5 or 6 years, to write it flexibly enough that it allows things to change so you can update it to new industry standards, regulations, working practices. Well world skills attempt that from a different approach. Let's tear it up and rewrite it every two years. Yeah. So the one that's just been written is the one for Shanghai. Yeah. So here's, we call it the World Skills Occupational Standards. So that's just been written. So we will use that for the next two years. And immediately after Shanghai it'll be tore up and a new one will be written. And do you feel like education should do the same then? Should they be refreshing every two years rather than... I think a lot of educators do though. So people like myself and I mentioned as well, there's some educators I work with already. So New College Lanarkshire, Sheffield Hallam, London South Bank, Middlesex, Oxford Brookes. They work quite closely with me. So what they do is they take our materials and they start to embed that within their courses. A good example actually is Isabelle that’s sitting over there, her lecturer Jeff, he's written the course in a way that there's a work placement. And if the students don't go on work placement they would use the world skills modules. So all the training resources and assessment materials. And that's what Isabelle was doing. So with Jeff's support for everything else that they teach on the architectural technology course, and then that little bit of upskilling from the world skills side that brings it quite relevant and up to date, Isabelle made squad. Yeah. So it definitely works. Yeah. Impressive. Thank you. Yeah. Well I think that's probably enough to keep people thinking... Google World Skills UK Digital Construction. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Appreciate it.