Bridging the BIM Skills Gap Through an International Industry-Focused Competition

The first ever "BIM in Construction" competition for World Skills was held at the national level in Ireland, hosted by the Technological University Dublin in June 2018. This competition was designed to draw out the students’ knowledge, understanding, and ability to construct an intelligent model to be used by a multidisciplinary team for a building design, tender, construction, and operation. The competitors worked to industry standards and used the BIM 360 cloud server to host their models. This competition had a set of 11 assessed deliverables to test their skills both in graphic modeling and information creation and coordination. Further national competitions were held in the United Kingdom, where the original framework was developed to test other core skills. Based on the success of these national competitions, the World Skills organization included a BIM (Building Information Modeling) competition in the Future Skills portfolio in Kazan, Russia, in 2019. This presentation will outline the development of the competition, report on the experience of the national competitions, and cover the amazing experience of the winners of the first World Skills BIM competition in Kazan. The presentation will show how third-level educational institutions can tailor their BIM education programs within their domain-specific courses so they can enter and be competitive in the national heats of World Skills BIM competition, and in turn respond to industry needs while improving students’ employment prospects.