"You mean we used to build buildings ourselves?" says little Johnnie, reclining on his morphable body support, protected from the radiation pouring through an ozone-depleted sky by the walls of your house, thin membranes of polymer composites, stacked, molecule by molecule, by billions of molecular machines.

"That's right, and your great-great grandfather used to be a construction manager."

"Wow! I want to be a construction manager."

"Oh no, Johnnie," you chuckle, "there's no such thing as construction any more."

Depending on how your week has been, this snapshot may bring joy, sadness or just disbelief. It comes from an architect who believes it's inevitable. Is it just his wishful thinking, that we could consign the whole, limiting, messy business of construction to the dustbin of history? Or are nanobots that build a likely outcome? Turn to page 14 for a full discussion.

No card, no work?
Full marks to the Major Contractors Group and the industry at large for getting 500,000 workers and professionals carded up under the Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS). As a proportion of the estimated 1.25m construction workers who should be carded, it's quite an achievement.

But there's a danger we'll never see a major improvement.

If having a card is not really compulsory, a 100% qualified workforce will be very difficult to achieve. Compulsory means "No card, no work", anywhere. As long as there are places where tradesmen can work without cards, and as long as having a card bestows no financial advantage, it will be like trying to fill a leaky bathtub.

The real threat to the scheme is this: many companies have spent time and resource getting their workers carded. Many workers have put in the effort of getting their NVQs and passing the health and safety test. But after all that, they still see their self-employed colleagues carrying on as before without cards. Both individuals and companies will lose the motivation to carry on the effort.

And this will be tantamount to switching the taps off and letting the bath drain.

Source

Construction Manager