Education Resources for Offsite Construction

Welsh Government (WG) have set our industry with a significant target.  To build 20,000 homes by 2021.  This is needed to meet the housing demand.  Offsite Manufacturing and Modern Methods of Construction are seen as the means by which the industry can accelerate and fulfil this need.   A £45 million funding package has been kick started by Welsh Government. 

For the past year Construction Wales Innovation Centre (CWIC) has been a partner in the Offsite Ready training programme led by Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CS-IC).  Offsite Ready is funded by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and was conceived to improve the understanding of offsite construction amongst further and higher education teaching staff, employers delivering in-house training, schools delivering built environment courses and private training providers.

Offsite Ready is a collaborative project delivered by the Ministry of Building Innovation + Education (MOBIE), Edinburgh Napier University, Class of Your Own, the City of Glasgow College and Construction Wales Innovation Centre.

In order for this nascent part of the construction industry to develop we also need the current and future workforce to be skilled appropriately.  The education sector, in its widest sense, has a key role to play in growing best practice and skills in offsite construction.  

Launched in April, the Offsite Ready project has created a range of free-to-access online learning resources available to download at any time from its website offsiteready.com

These resources have been complemented by a series of collaborative webinars with panellists invited from industry and academia.  CWIC has hosted 4 webinars recently with contributions from several industry experts and academics as guest panellists. We’ve covered an Introduction to Offsite Construction (the Fundamentals), Offsite Manufacturing, Onsite Placement, Assembly and Logistics and Digital Design, Estimating and Commercial so far.

Our webinars have caught the interest of academics as far as Indonesia and Morocco and have been attended by over 90 participants spanning industry, trade bodies, local authorities, further and higher education across Wales.

These wouldn’t have been possible without our guest speakers Jasper Meade of PYC Construction, David Ward at TRJ contractors, Andy King and Mark Carter of Wernick Group, Andrew Duggan, Managing Director of Off-site Manufacturing at the Castleoak in Cardiff, and Lindsay Richards, The Richards Partnership for their industry insight and Dr. Mila Duncheva and Eoin Plant-O’Toole PhD, Edinburgh Napier University for their academic knowledge.

If you missed these webinars and would like to know what our industry and academic guest speakers had to say on the topics we covered please visit our YouTube channel.