We recently had the privilege of attending the BIM conference at Kings Place, London. The day was aimed at answering the question of why BIM should play a key role in the industry and enabled delegates to share experiences of using BIM and how it has benefited their individual companies. The main conference saw large and small companies describe some of the key steps to rolling out BIM in a business and provided tips from their experiences, speakers also debated some key challenges for BIM in the coming year.

Derek Pratley was asked to give a short talk in the speakers corner where he enforced that the best way for a company to learn BIM is on the job...

"There needs to be a standard for BIM. There's a convention for AutoCAD: everyone knows that if you pick up a drawing anyone can work on it. But there's no standard for BIM.

The best way to learn is on the job. Get your team to build BIM into a project. It might mean you are a bit slower at first but they are learning. Get people to go through the Autodesk training stages. We brought training into the academy we already have within our business and now we are an accredited training centre."