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In recent years, the construction industry has experienced the introduction of emerging technologies developed to improve project outcomes and labor productivity, including BIM. Construction companies feel the pressure to adopt these technologies and the importance that all project stakeholders have an understanding of the technologies and their impact on industry change. In many ways, BIM is the connection between these technologies and provides a single source of information for sharing within the project team and across the facility life cycle. As the digital transformation proliferates all aspects of the BE, higher education is challenged to prepare design, engineering, and construction students who are ready to enter the workforce. The challenge is complex as educators strive to meet the criteria set forth by their institution, policy decisions/regulation, accreditation standards, and industry expectations. While workforce requirements typically respond to the national economy, digital transformation in the construction industry is global.

This chapter explores how we create and support a digitally enabled, agile, competent, and ultimately, productive workforce and determines the key research questions that need to be addressed if Digital Built Britain (DBB) is to provide return on investment and succeed as the catalyst for evolving the manner in which we conceive, plan, design, construct, operate, and interact with the built environment. The proposed vision is a digital competency management ecosystem where interdependent stakeholders are incentivised to work together in coopetition to create, capture, infer, interpret, specify, integrate, accredit, apply, use, monitor, and evolve competence as a working (data) asset. This needs to be in a consistent, objective, explicit, and scalable manner, with end2end transparency and traceability for all stakeholders that overcome the challenges of competency management. Moreover, a core element must be an ecosystem organised around digital infrastructure of competency frameworks and other knowledge sources of competence, so that competency frameworks are in digital operation and dynamic context.

Education of the built environment is moving towards more collaborative practices. The intent behind the collaborative approach of teaching is to encourage students to explore the unknowns and unravel the problems themselves with the professor acting as the facilitator. This chapter presents the case for collaborative pedagogical approaches that was adopted to teach students from two geographically distant universities. The occasion used was preparation of student teams for Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) student competitions. The underlying philosophy behind this initiative is to provide the context for the future leaders in the AEC to learn by doing in a safer and potentially rewarding environment.

A 30-month project is presented that is enabled through a knowledge transfer partnership government-funded initiative between the University of Salford and Links FF&E – a design, manufacture, and fit-out SME in the UK. The project is aiming to implement BIM as a catalyst for a lean transformation to streamline processes and operations through the adoption of a case study methodology on a design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) BIM implementation at Links FF&E. The findings highlight that the challenges for SMEs adopting disruptive technology could be mitigated with a business case that considers the changes on organizational processes and workflows by embedding technologies within the company with the focus on eliminating waste in the processes and adding value.