Industrialising the construction industry: a collaborative training and education model

The United Kingdom (UK) construction industry has long been the centre of criticism and debate for its relative poor performance and high turnover. In this respect, the UK Government embarked on reviving Offsite Production (OSP) in an attempt to negate these issues, whilst simultaneously reducing the dependence on manual skills. However, extant literature highlights that professional (non-manual) skill shortages are just as acute. Notwithstanding these factors, from a training and education perspective, it is widely acknowledged that the myriad of approaches currently deployed to address professional education and training needs have systematically failed to fully satisfy industry's expectations. This is due in part to the lack of a 'common language' between the construction industry and the training/education providers. Given that OSP training and education is a predominant driver for the successful and wider uptake of OSP, there is no direct empirical evidence on the type, level, or priorities of OSP training and education required to meet the new exigent business drivers. This research focuses on addressing the polarised silos that currently exist between industry and training/education providers through the provision of a flexible collaborative model. This model embodies multi-criteria and multistakeholder perceptions and imperatives in order to help provide a 'shared' language and understanding across these multivariate issues to formally identify and prioritise OSP training and education needs. This research adopted a system approach to OSP training and education using the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method to develop an OSP-QFD model. The positioning of this research adopts the positivism paradigm to infer OSP skills requirements, underpinned and supported by a triangulation approach to define the measures to satisfy those needs and help increase the validity and reliability of the data obtained. The model was iteratively tested and validated using domain experts from industry, academia and research organisations. Research findings confirmed the scepticism and misconception of the construction industry and academia with regard to OSP and industryacademia collaboration. However, the developed OSP-QFD model demonstrated that it could be used to shape, structure, and document the skills needed from multivariate viewpoints, thereby addressing the different drivers and expectations of the polarised stakeholders. Furthermore, the OSP-QFD model accommodates design flexibility, so that individual priorities can be independently assessed and analysed.