OFFSITE SKILLS & TRAINING
OFFSITE READY TO ROLL
The Offsite Ready project is a series of collaborative events and online modules that will bring offsite skills into focus for a wide audience. Douglas Morrison, Director of Operations and Future Skills, at Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CSIC) outlines what the programme hopes to achieve.
1 As the construction industry is facing unprecedented challenges during the current coronavirus crisis, we are all having to rapidly adapt our way of working in order to mitigate the impacts of this universal threat. Our response to this immediate threat is to ensure the health of our workforces, reduce the financial impact on businesses, many of them SMEs, and also to protect the future delivery and operation of the nation’s critical infrastructure, housing and wider built environment assets. But I also think we have an opportunity to learn during this time and take note of just how quickly our abilities to change and adapt can help us to tackle more longstanding challenges.
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The construction industry has been facing a period of significant change for some time now. CSIC is here to support industry, look to the future and do things better to build resilience – and that includes tackling our housing shortage through cleaner, safer and more productive building techniques, like offsite construction. By embracing new techniques in controlled factory environments offsite, or near-site, we can enhance pre-manufactured value. Moving more to offsite construction can also deliver financial and sustainable improvements that lead to longer term inclusive growth. Offsite offers the opportunity to build stronger collaborative partnerships between clients and contractors, where
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2 risk and reward is shared, innovation is encouraged and we build flexible, capable teams who can together, deliver a sustainable built environment that meets customer demand and needs. We have been somewhat slower than other countries to adopt offsite techniques, with only 5% of construction in the UK using this method compared to 12-15% in Japan and 20% in Sweden. However, the good news is that, with nearly half of construction industry employers expecting to use offsite techniques within the next five years, we have a unique opportunity to harness the UK’s innovation capacity in this respect.