Surveying practice involvement in providing vocational skills training for undergraduate building surveyors: The ICZ way

Abstract

The paper starts from a documented premise of there being a critical shortage of skilled building surveyors. It also uses a researched premise that all stakeholders to building surveying education favour the incorporation of vocational skills training alongside academic instruction. This creates graduates already possessing core vocational skills and a knowledge of practice. The question posed is whether practitioners themselves can assist in this skills transfer, or whether it should be left wholly to specialist educators to devise ways of delivering such knowledge. A fortunate opportunity which allows the author to evaluate two identical activities of dilapidations surveying undertaken by the same learners, in the same academic period, under identical conditions, with one facilitated and lead by a specialist surveying tutor as an industrial simulation and the other facilitated and lead by a current practitioner, on a current dilapidations instruction. Findings tend towards a belief that practice reaching out to assist educators is a worthwhile way that any future skills shortages can be addressed through graduates entering practice with greater experience of vocational practices and skills.