Abstract
Professional, organisational and educational institutions have started to adopt BIM software tools and adapt their existing delivery systems to satisfy evolving market requirements. To enable individuals within these organisations to develop their BIM abilities, it is important to identify the BIM competencies that need to be learned, applied on the job, and measured for the purposes of performance improvement. Expanding upon previous research, this paper focuses on individual BIM competencies, the building blocks of organisational capability. The paper first introduces several taxonomies and conceptual models to clarify how individual competencies may be filtered, classified, and aggregated into a seed competency inventory. Competency items are then fed into a specialised knowledge engine to generate flexible assessment tools, learning modules and process workflows. Finally, the paper discusses the many benefits this competency-based approach brings to industry and academia, and explores future conceptual and tool development efforts to enable industry-wide BIM performance assessment and improvement.
1. Introduction
Individual competencies are the fundamental building blocks of organisational competency. As such they represent a common set of standards that can be used for human resource planning, management, and development [52,57,35]. Individual competencies are crucial for managing the performance of an organisation [22], and according to Sanchez and Levine [76], the “same set of competencies normally cuts across jobs and layers of the organisation” and thus can be identified and analysed irrespective of organisational departments and units.
11. Future work
This paper has explored individual competencies, the fundamental building blocks of organisational capability. Expanding on previous research, several formative classifications have been introduced and used to develop an integrated definition of Individual BIM Competency. This integrated definition acted as a conceptual filter to isolate target competencies which were then classified through a specialized taxonomy and used to populate a seed inventory of generic BIM competencies. A knowledge engine was then introduced to demonstrate how each structured competency item could be used for the complementary purposes of competency acquisition, application and learning.
