First Building Controls Technical Certificates Awarded
The Building Controls (BCG) and Controls System Specialists (CSSG) Groups of ESTA chose the 3rd National Building controls Industry conference as the venue to award the first of their Technical Certificates. BCG Chairman, Terry Sharp of Invensys, presented seven certificates to employees from AES Control Systems, Schneider Electric, Siemens Building Technologies, Ashdown Control Services, and main contractors, Skanska Whitehall.
David Green, Project Manager for BMS at Skanska Whitehall, was the stranger in the controls camp, being directly employed by Swedish-based Skanska, Europe's largest main contractor. "My background is mechanical engineering but I now have responsibilities for BMS contracts, therefore it is imperative that I have a good understanding of building control systems. For some time I have been trying to locate an informative course that would stretch my knowledge of building controls and this training programme certainly achieved that. With 19 years of building services experience behind me, I wasn't expecting the courses to be quite as challenging as they turned out to be, but in my opinion that only underlines the extensiveness of the training modules.
"Since completing the first course, I have become more confident when speaking with controls engineers. For example, Skanska is currently working with Siemens Building Technologies on a new MOD building in Whitehall and with my increased understanding of controls the meetings have become much more productive. I have now enrolled for the Advanced Technical Certificate."
At the other end of the scale, Richard Steel entered the controls industry only five months ago when he joined Siemens Building Technologies as a Trainee Branch Engineer with a degree in mechanical engineering from Portsmouth University. "I was impressed with the introduction module to HVAC, which covered these services in some depth. I am confident that I now fully understand the fundamentals of the controls industry and do not feel at a disadvantage when working with more senior engineers. The notebooks in particular have proved to be useful reference material."
Course trainer, Keith Doherty, has run over 180 delegate days of training since the programme was launched in November 2002. The current series of courses are booked through to this summer with a rollout programme scheduled to 2004. "We have also experienced an unexpectedly high number of in-house training requests from individual companies, thereby clearly demonstrating the need for comprehensive and dedicated building controls training," he said.
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