BIM Training and Career Advice

[airsafari87]

During my last period of employment a couple of contracts the company were bidding on demanded that we had a BIM manager within the company, role which would have fallen to me had the company wished to pursue it any further.

Unfortunately they viewed it as too much of a hassle so never took things any further, but it was something which genuinely piqued my interest and I do see BIM management as a direction I would like to move towards.

I have attended a couple of introduction to BIM level 2 seminars and spent some time on the B1m website, so I have a little background knowledge of the process.

The principal reason for this post is to hopefully get some recommendations for BIM training courses, I see that bsi run a fundamentals course as well as other more advanced courses.
Has anyone attended and completed these courses?
Are they worthwhile?
Is there any other courses superior to those ran by the bsi?

A brief background on me and my experience.

I have worked in the engineering / construction industry for 25 years.
20 years or so of those years have been spent in drawing offices using 2D AutoCAD, Inventor, Solidworks and more recently Tekla BIMsight which was used during my previous role for the review of steel frame buildings. The company I worked for are a primary and secondary steel work fabricator.
I have taken charge of 2 drawing offices which had little to no procedures in place and I did implement procedures and practices within both of them so I am comfortable with that side of things.
The remaining 5 years have been more managerial, but still within a drawing office / technical environment.

After looking at various BIM jobs advertised, I see that Revit appears to be one of the more commonly used programs used and demanded by employers. Revit is something which I have never used, but given my years using other Autodesk products I would assume that it would be a fairly simple transition in to Revit for me? I am willing to take further training on that though.

Any advice and recommendations will be great appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[airsafari87]

smithyithy said:

I've been working in Highways for about 5 years, mainly on the Design side. We use BIM currently for the AutoCAD work on our projects. For the most part I've had very little actual exposure to it, but we do, as a business, aim to adopt it more going forward and working towards higher levels of compliance.

Couple months ago I was, for lack of a better phrasing, randomly nominated to complete a BIM online course. It was all done online at my desk, through BRE Academy: https://www.bre.co.uk/academy/page.jsp?id=3516

I will say it was quite interesting and useful, I did the online training and passed the included exams.

To be honest I don't think I'll have much hands-on experience with it, it seems more useful when used for proper project management - the stuff I work on is relatively small scale and to be fair it's well beyond my pay scale or skill to implement something like this..

But anyway, the course was interesting enough, I'd recommend the BRE Academy, if they offer the sort of thing you're looking for.

Thanks for the reply and link.

Much like yourself, my exposure to BIM so far pretty much mirrors your exposure, however it is something I find interesting and beneficial and am keen to pursue further.

[airsafari87]

Wanchaiwarrior said:

Revit is taking over the world

That does appear to be the case.

For all my experience on other CAD packages (well over 20 years) I have never had any exposure to Revit and fear that I may be left behind.

Time for me to get a solid action plan put in place I think.