M&SDP Case Study: Piling
The training and development need
The Institution of Civil Engineers’ Specification for Piling and Embedded Retaining Walls (SPERWall) is the definitive guide for the piling sector in the UK. “It is the essential spec for everyone who designs and constructs piling and retaining walls.”
A new edition of the specification was published in 2007 – the first significant revision for 15 years. It included fundamental changes to the technical detail companies have to meet in order to comply with health and safety and revised best practice requirements.
“It was vital that everyone in the sector was aware of the changes – contractors and consultants alike.”
The project
A half-day training course was developed by an independent consultant, David Cork, who had previously worked on revising the specification. He also delivered the workshop sessions.
Money from ConstructionSkills’ Management and Supervisory Development Programme (M&SDP) was provided to the FPS via the NSCC. It helped to fund the course development work, but was also used to subsidise the cost of attending for Federation members.
“Given the relatively small size of the sector, when the course was originally planned, we envisaged running three seminars, reaching around 40 delegates.
“But the subsidies provided by the M&SDP funding helped us to reduce the cost of the sessions by around £250 per person. This encouraged employers to release more of their employees to attend, and we actually ran five seminars – in London, Derby and Manchester – for 69 delegates from the contractor community. Representatives of every member company attended.
“This significantly higher than expected turnout encouraged us to hold three further seminars for the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists, who represent the sector’s consultant engineers. These were in London, Manchester and Glasgow, and were again available at reasonable cost."
The benefits
“The whole sector benefited. This was something that everyone needed to know about. And without the high-levels of attendance we achieved, dissemination of the information would have been piecemeal.
“Individuals would have had to read the new specification themselves and interpret it for colleagues.
“As it is, the information was distributed quickly and with much greater clarity and consistency. Everyone has the same hymn sheet.”
The course presentations are now available for all Federation members on the FPS website. This is in line with M&SDP funding rules which require companies and organisations to share some of the results of their work among other companies in their sector and the wider construction industry.
The lessons
“The biggest investment that a company makes in sending people on a training programme is the time that the delegates spend away from work. If you then hit the company with a high cost for the course itself, that will be reflected in the numbers who attend.
“But, if you have a good course at the right price, you will get the turnout.
“The M&SDP grant let us do it at the right price – and as a result we were over-subscribed.”
The participants
Mike Cowan is the Southern Area Manager of May Gurney’s Engineering & Project Services division.
“We have to work with the ICE Specification and it is a substantial document. Going through it in detail would have been very time consuming. The seminar was an efficient way of finding out what changes had been made to the Spec, and what they meant.”
The spokesperson
Dianne Jennings is General Secretary of the FPS.
The company
The Federation of Piling Specialists (FPS) is a trade association. It is affiliated to the National Specialist Contractors’ Council (NSCC) and represents the UK’s leading piling and foundation specialists.
This is a relatively small – and strictly controlled – sector of the construction industry which employs around 4,000 people in both contracting and professional companies. Until recently the FPS had a membership of 18.
The ConstructionSkills approach
The Management and Supervisory Development Programme (M&SDP) was set up in 2001 by ConstructionSkills (then CITB) to provide financial support to Federation members pursuing management qualifications, business improvement initiatives and management and supervisory training.
Research carried out in 2007 by ConstructionSkills identified a set of common management skills gaps and revealed that almost one in five directors and senior managers in the industry has no formal qualifications at all.
The M&SDP fund which is always fully used, supports an average of 45 projects at a time. Since the programme was established, more than 300 projects have benefited, with 85-90% of all successful applications coming from Federations which represent small and medium-sized companies