Simulating success

I’m supposed to be disciplining a construction worker, but I can’t stop smiling. Not a very professional or realistic reaction, but that’s because I’m a journalist and not a site manager.

Inside Housing attended the launch of the £8.7 million ACT-UK Simulation Centre in Coventry earlier this month along with 140 members of the great and good of the construction industry, and left convinced that a construction professional would learn a lot from an intensive training session there.

‘You’ve only got to be in there for a few minutes and you feel immersed in it,’ confirms Rob Lockey, head of training services at the National House Building Council, which was one of the consultants on the development of the simulation centre. It offers a 4-D experience to site managers and trainees using a 12-metre, panoramic screen which recreates a variety of scenarios - selected to reflect the particular training required. The participant works from within one of 11 fully-equipped site cabins, complete with real-life site plans, working computers and telephones.

Clive Benfield, chair of ACT-UK, started work on getting a simulation centre built in his home town of Coventry after he visited a similar centre in the Netherlands in 2004. ‘This is a unique way of training,’ he announced at the launch event.

The project became a reality when regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, currently unsure of its fate while the government decides exactly what it wants to do with regional development agencies, contributed £6.6 million towards it, and Coventry University Enterprises, the Learning and Skills Council Coventry and Warwickshire and private construction companies put forward the remaining £2.1 million between them.

With technical consultation from the NHBC and the Chartered Institute of Building, the UK simulation centre relates directly to the problems and procedures of the UK construction industry. Clients have so far included contractors Balfour Beatty and Wilmott Dixon and house builder Barratt Developments.

At work

A team of five trained actors, all of whom have experience of the construction industry, play the parts of colleagues, employees, sub-contractors and suppliers. They burst into the cabin and so starts the simulation. Tasks trainees need to complete include dealing with unhappy clients, ordering products and handling time-wasting employees.

Michiel Schrijver, managing director of ACT-UK, developed the Dutch Building Management Simulation Centre, which so impressed Mr Benfield six years ago, and moved to Coventry to work on the project there. ‘Construction is more and more about team work,’ he says. ‘The technical level of most people in construction is very good, but the soft skills can be developed.’

The beauty of the simulation centre, he adds, is that ‘you can stop the process, start again and miss out the risks, the financial risks and the health and safety risks.’

Trainees are briefed before they enter their site cabin, but exactly how events will unfold is unpredictable. Any given scenario has to follow a certain script so that individual performances can be assessed, but it’s impossible to plan individual responses says actor Geoff Mann, who is employed by the NHBC’s training department to work at the simulation centre.

While Inside Housing’s reporter couldn’t help but laugh during her brief experience disciplining somebody, ‘One of the [site] managers locked me in the office and started swearing. He was on the verge of throwing furniture,’ recalls Mr Mann.

Sessions in the simulation centre usually last one-and-a-half hours. From a control centre above, a director and two or three supervisors steer the process. As they watch events unfold on TV screens, they send emails and make phone calls to the cabin, pretending to be clients and contractors with any number of requests.

‘As soon as the door is closed, you can feel the stress levels go whoosh. They’re rushing into chaotic, real life situations,’ says Julian Ingleby, a director at management consultancy Moju Consulting, which specialises in the design and operation of science parks like the Coventry University Technology Park, where the ACT-UK simulator is located.

Sometimes employers send a delegate to sit in the control room so they can see the individuals’ reactions themselves. They then attend the de-brief session in which the director, supervisors and actors give feedback on how the trainee handled the task - commenting on everything from their technical knowledge to their body language. ‘We tell them how we were made to feel,’ says Mr Mann.

Scenarios are all played out against the back drop of the 12-metre screen which plays continuous scenes based on one of two real-life construction projects: the development of social housing at Aldermans Green in Coventry, for Whitefriars Housing Group, and the building of office development 11 Brindley Place in Birmingham.

As each of these now complete schemes was built, ACT-UK took photos every week for a year. These photos were used to build the 3D film that runs throughout the simulation. Employers can choose the phase of development they want their trainees to be working on during their session.

Tailored training

Many of the tasks based around the social housing development include elements of cost control, particularly concerning pre-planning to increase productivity. John Egan, chancellor of Coventry University who chaired the last government’s 1998 Construction Task Force, comments that ‘the cost of building houses has remained the same for the past 10 years’.

The challenge for house building, especially when developing social housing, says Mr Schrijver is to produce ‘a high quality house for an affordable price’.

During the real-life development of housing at Aldermans Green there was a problem with the foundations, and this is worked into certain tasks at the simulation centre, he says. ‘When they started to build, one corner of the plot was far too soft to build houses on, so at that moment you have to take technical measurements, which delays the process, which then raises costs,’ explains Mr Schrijver.

Another real-life predicament that came up during the development in Coventry was communication with local residents who do not want housing developed. ‘The builders are not always able to handle that problem in a capable way and it makes enemies instead of friends,’ says Mr Schrijver.

The ACT-UK Simulation Centre bosses point out that simulators are part of training in many professions. ‘We’re all happy to go in planes when pilots have learned how to fly using a simulator, states James Wates, deputy chair of Wates Group, who chairs the Construction Industry Training Board’s sector skills council Constructionskills.

When a US Airways pilot conducted an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River last year, he knew what he was doing because of his training in a simulator, adds Mr Schrijver.

The simulation centre learning experience certainly seems intense - imagine your worst day at work, that day when the problems just didn’t stop coming, and compact it into less than two hours. What we want to know is, when will they design one for the newsroom?

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment