The future of good work

AT the start of the summer, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Autodesk Foundation released the report Good work innovations in Europe: Reimagining the social contract with a sector insight report on construction and manufacturing. The report looks at the increasing role of automation and technology against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and asks what its effect will be.

What good work is can be easily derived from the paper. It is fair, equitable, open, progressive, rewarding and benefits the employee, employer, society and the environment. How will automation and artificial intelligence affect what is good? The answer differs both by region and sector. The construction bubble is regularly told it must transform or die, and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is part of a world that must transform or die. The report introduces some much needed context around this brave new world, where change is afoot for everyone. CICES member Marek Suchocki, infrastructure industry engagement lead at Autodesk, spoke to Abigail Tomkins about good work innovations and what they mean for those working in construction.

Is the construction professional a dying breed?

The sector insight paper actually found that construction has a lower automation risk than most manufacturing sub-sectors, as activities are less repetitive and are carried out in less predictable environments. Construction still has a high manual input, and that’s not going to go away in a hurry. We talk about robot bricklayers, but they’re fairly few and far between because of the nature of construction – every project is vaguely different.

We’re seeing lots of opportunities to leverage machine control from digital information, setting out is now much faster because it’s coming off a model rather than somebody measuring it. Automation is already aiding design. We’re seeing new tools that give contextual understanding of a potential design change. We’re seeing generative design, running more options than a human being can ever do. We’ve got new tools that can augment the professional, but we’re not suddenly going to take the designer, surveyor or the architect out of the process.

If we can encapsulate the routine skills of an architect, engineer and surveyor into some rules, like a quantity take-off from a shape, then that’s what a computer will be brilliant at. If you tell it the rules, it will go off and crunch it for you. We are after the answer, not the routine process of creating the answer. Data gives you the chance to create information which you apply wisdom to. It’s the old tomato thing. Knowledge is that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

If this report had been written pre-pandemic, would it have a different outlook?

The pandemic has certainly accelerated change. There’s been a big shift to the gig economy, temporary work and self-employment. Construction has always had a kind of a gig economy – if you’re a bricky or a sparky, you’re employed job to job – but other industries have had to adopt some of those characteristics. 14% of workers are in the gig economy and 14% are self-employed, but it appears that most of these people have chosen and embraced this way of work.

We had a lot of negativity around zero-hours contracts a couple of years ago, but now we are seeing that it hasn’t necessarily been a negative way to go. Especially for those who are building their career, these types of temporary, shorter term contracts may be more attractive because they are trying to find their place in the world, where they want to live and how they will earn the money that will give them the chances to do that.

Will we see more changes in construction employment?

Manufacture offsite and assemble onsite has huge connotations for construction workers. The Trans-Pennine road upgrade is looking at getting the construction time down from ten to five years, principally by adopting offsite techniques. Offsite will mean we execute projects differently, and that means we need different types of employees in our industry – from the planners on the professional side to the workers in the factories.

Laing O’Rourke’s offsite factory in Steetley calls in employees when they are needed to work and keeps them on in between. Previously a construction worker would have travelled away from home to work for what might only be a set period of time. With this model of working, Laing is offering job security and many of the employees live in the local community. The potential negative may be a lower salary because the compensation for working away from home on a short contract is offset by other benefits.

This shift is in line with how policy is driving change in employment. The UK government’s Construction Playbook has shown that policy and procedures will underpin change. Our contracts and requirements will be written differently and this will mean the kind of employees and how we employ them will be slightly different.

Is good work open to all?

There is a lot of talk about levelling up and we’re seeing a shift in the framing of this so that it is about boosting pride in new types of jobs, rather than focusing on if you come from an affluent area of not.

Construction has always been in that mindset of having ‘good work’ accessible to all and there are many routes into the industry and many pathways to progress. We have the different problem of not attracting enough young people into the profession. The surveying profession is a really rewarding career. It is fun to get involved in and you’re at the forefront of technology. Yet we seem to have a marketing challenge to highlight that.

One of the comments made in the CICES BIM white paper working group was: ‘My role won’t exist in five years, but my intelligence will still be required.’ Is everyone as reassured that they will be needed in the future?

Yes, they should be. Digital transformation is not a negative. It doesn’t mean that there will be swarms of people unemployed and struggling. Automation isn’t going to displace human beings. The robots aren’t going to take away our jobs, it just might mean that we’re going to have to do things differently.

From an institutional perspective, CICES needs to gear up to make sure that our members understand this – and this is why work around the white paper is so important. Because if we keep assessing members against an old baseline, we are in danger of missing the skills that will be needed in the future.

What role does a technology provider play in reskilling?

When I joined Autodesk 11 years ago, we provided guidance in books that were rarely opened, like the huge copy I still have of Mastering Civil 3D 2011! There were lots of pages and training was classroom based, just how we still educate our children. But in the last decade, we’ve totally changed our support. We don’t print books anymore. We have help files and tutorials online. People are self-learning as much as they’re going to professional trainers. We see a lot of community-based learning, through YouTube and our knowledge network. People are learning skills on demand.

Are MOOCs the future for learning?

They are part of the future. MOOCs [massively open online courses] are a growing trend where people can selectively register for courses. There are many of them and they all have various modules you can pick and choose from. Again, maybe this is what CICES should be looking at and considering how it offers accreditation for new skills. These courses can be a way of attracting people to our profession, and if we can get them on a defined path to follow and progress through, we’ll have a new route to qualification as well as a reskilled workforce.

One downside the report picked up was that there is a low completion rate of 10% for MOOCs, but we are seeing these courses attracting more women. Figures from Finland show MOOCs and technology bootcamp-style learning having 40% females. While there are probably other factors at play around how we attract young people into our industry, if you ask if we currently discourage engineering as a career of choice for women, I think the answer is yes. Maybe MOOCs and tech bootcamps are one of the ways we can start improving that balance.

How important is it to address digital transformation regionally?

We need to understand the demographic and local differences between regions, certainly around Europe, that will be affected by the move towards digitalisation. It’s very easy to paint everything with the same brush, but that’s not the case, there are huge differences even in very local places in every country. Finland is a very different place to the UK in terms of society behaviour and approach to education, but we can still learn from its findings around training and skills.

Does digitalisation go hand in hand with sustainability?

To deliver a net zero outcome, we have to plan and design and construct our projects differently. We have a very cost-based mindset that has been focused on capital cost, as opposed to operational and life cycle cost. Now we need to add in the cost to our environment. Again, this means we’ll have to do our jobs slightly differently because we will have to take a different type of responsibility for how we assess a project. We don’t have the answers yet. There are some huge investment figures being talked about to ‘build back better’ and a lot of that will be in research.

It will require an emotional shift to get to net zero. Greta Thunberg has had an amazing impact, and whilst the speed of change may seem challenging, she’s brought with her a whole movement amongst younger people who buy into it. If they can sustain that passion, then they’ll be an instrument of change. But everything relies on personal behaviour, for example consider not getting the car to school anymore and that you might have to put your phone down, because charging it relies on drawing electricity that needs to be generated. There is an obligation on all of us to behave differently. It’s important for us to consider the global perspective on the changing roles we face as a profession, and the issues we need to be considering as an institution.

Marek Suchocki MCInstCES, Infrastructure Industry Engagement Lead, Autodesk, was talking to Abigail Tomkins
marek.suchocki@autodesk.com @msuchocki www.autodesk.co.uk/workforce

Marek Suchocki is a member of the CICES Geospatial Engineering Practices Committee and BIM White Paper Working Group.

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