The type of workers that
contractors employ today and
DOTs and inspectors and engineering firms will change.
The skill sets will be different. Certainly you'll
need surveyors and you'll need people comfortable
with digital modeling and, you know, computer skills
but if you're all in, you
may also be employing neural network
architects and trying to understand AI
and how that could benefit your job site.
The ability to analyze buildings,
I hope that we'll see it more
less as a niche thing,
the ability to use software to analyze
our designs, thinking deeply
about material selection, embodied carbon,
and being able to analyze and show
the impact of things.
Just the ability to think outside the box,
as cliche as that sounds, I think what
we really need in construction are creative
thinkers and creative problem solvers.
At the end of the day technologies will
come and change and evolve over time,
but what really drives
that innovation is is thinking about the problem differently.
More remote control,
allowing people to have you know potentially
an office job but still operate machines.
So getting to live in cities but
you know digitally travel to their workplace
with remote locations,
where they can sit in an office space
control one machine many machines
maybe all around the world.
Everything is gonna start being connected
in a way that,
you know, hasn't happened yet.
And that's gonna unlock a whole new
area for people to start
looking at all the various feeds of information
that are coming back from all of their field tools
Really data centric. So data scientists,
data analysts,
people who can bring together all of
that digital information and use it to draw some insights
about what's happening.
...skills as being a generalist or a specialist —
So I think we've had in the-
when you look at the construction industry we see
a lot of specialists in play
and not enough generalists.
So what that does is there is this
siloed approach to work.
I think having more generalists,
more people that understand more
about the process.
To start to think more about modeling
buildings like gaming technology,
you're going to need different people inside
a contractor or inside a
technology company to sort of provide the next generation
of technologies to the construction industry.
So I think if
we talk about it like that to
universities and trade schools
and unions,
certainly it becomes a lot more of an exciting
industry to be working in.