IC Curriculum That Brings Industry and Academia Together

JOHN HERRIDGE: Well, good morning. Welcome to this session on Industrialized Construction Curriculum That Brings Industry and Academia Together. My name is John Herridge. I'm with Autodesk Education. I help prepare builders, engineers, and architects for the future of making things in construction and higher education. We have a great program planned for you today.

And I would like to check in and just understand who is in the audience. If you would, please, raise your hands. How many are from industry? All right. I'd say about 50%.

I think the other cohort is from academia. Raise your hands. Yes. And then we have other representing consultants who are probably Autodesk partners.

So in terms of the session goal today, the goal of the next hour is to explore how academia and industry can partner together to address the needs of developing the industrialized construction workforce pipeline to meet the needs and the demands for the built environment. And for industry, I believe, probably, what's keeping you up at night is where are you going to find the skilled talent that you not only need today, for traditional construction, but also for the future, that incorporates and enables industrialized construction. And for academia, you're probably asking yourself, where does industrialized construction fit in my curriculum today? So we will be addressing all those discussion points in our session today.

So let me keep going here. So this is the agenda that we're going to unfold for you today. Amy is going to start us off with an industrialized construction primer, just so we're all level set with some common knowledge. And then we'll get into the substance of our presentation, which is the panel session, and then discussing our new industrialized construction curriculum. We'll give you an overview of that that's applicable for both industry and academia.

And then we'll have questions and answers from you. To help curate those questions, I did put a QR code on there. I set up a Microsoft Forms document to collect those questions. So I encourage you to take a snapshot, and scan that QR code, and start entering your questions as they come up to you. Or, obviously, you'll be able to step up to the mic in the center aisle there and ask questions from there.

OK. So let's continue on here. All right. So let's introduce our fabulous panel. To my left is Amy Marks, the vice president of industrialized construction strategy and evangelism, also known as the Queen of Prefab from Autodesk. Give a hand.

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To her left is Andrew Rener. He's the president of Bouma Corporation from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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And to his left is Dr. Khalid Naji, the dean of the College of Engineering from Qatar University.

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And we also have Dr. Anil Sawhney. He is the director of infrastructure from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

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And absent because of the hurricane Ian, Dr. Raymond Issa, a distinguished professor and the director for the Center for Advanced Construction Information Modeling, is not able to join us today. But he did contribute to this panel, in terms of the preparation and voicing his point of view from the perspective of construction management program. So we'll get into these subtleties and roles here in just a few moments.

All right. I'm going to turn the floor over to Amy. And she's going to talk about what industrialized construction is and what it means.

AMY MARKS: Thank you, John. I'm going to quickly go through this. If you haven't been to any of the other classes I've been teaching at AU, a lot of them have been recorded, or you can just Google Queen of Prefab, not a self-given name, that you can see a lot of the recordings that we do.

So why is this all happening now? Why are we talking about industrialized construction? It's really because convergence has happened.

And so we're seeing convergence of technology. I always like to say my phone is no longer my phone. It's my map. It's maybe your matchmaker, your babysitter, your entertainment. So we're seeing technology actually converge.

And we're also seeing process converge, right? So, many of you have read some of the press releases that are coming out, Epic Games and Revit now talking about real-life rendering. You're seeing design and build. Obviously, that's been a process that's come together.

Manufacturing and design, if you haven't checked out our incubation at manufacturing and form design down there. We're seeing lots of different processes converge. And that means industries are converging. I've been in industrialized construction-- let's see, I'm 51-- for all of my life, basically. And so I like to say I've lived in the future for the last 20 years of industry convergence.

But for those of you who are from the business side, that means business models are changing. If you're from the academic side, that means we have to change our curriculum in order to produce people that can actually work in these new models of these new businesses. And right now we're at a critical point in time for both of those things. We have a lack of skilled labor shortage everywhere. We want to elevate the labor. We need digital natives join into our workforce. We need diversity in our workforce. And so we're seeing that happen everywhere.

A quick recap. So industrialized construction, a lot of people ask me, is it a wall panel? What does that mean? It's actually several things. So it's about technology enablers. Look, we're in a highly instrumented world, look on the back of your tag if you don't think so.

Everything we do is highly instrumented, and we have a need for big data and analytics. We also want to understand-- if you haven't been around for the last 2 and 1/2 years-- the cloud has been very important to us, being in COVID, so all stakeholders could actually get data. Seamless data is the goal with our cloud information models in Fusion format and flow these days. And the process enablers are very important.

We would like to have predictive manufacturing tools that actually exist and start applying those technologies so we don't have to make a phone call to see if that generator is going to show up at the job site who makes another phone call, makes another phone call, makes another phone call. We want to use AI and machine learning to understand supply chain transparency. And building information modeling is at the very baseline of what you have to-- I always say you have to be this tall to ride the ride at the carnival-- you need to have building information modeling. But we need to make the I more intelligent because many models are made that can't be built. And so it has to be informed by what can be made and that's manufacturing informed design.

A lot of people talk about DfMA. It depends on where you live in the world. I like to think of DfMA as the design methodology, not the entirety of the whole process. But DfMA has to change from just being designed to being really the data for ease of manufacturing and ease of assembly so that we can get physical piece parts that we used to call the prefabrication continuum up there on the top left. But many of the people that are in the construction world are productizing things so they can get repetition reuse and scale. And the people that are doing that first, obviously, are building product manufacturers who already have the data for products and can actually give us the data to inform design.

So we want to use that so that we can have robotics and automation on our job sites-- things like additive manufacturing and 3D printing. But we have to apply these manufacturing techniques to the entirety of the built environment. I like to think of it, not as design make, I like to think of it as operate, make information, design, and then inform. And that's really what industrialized construction is all about.

There are many benefits of industrialized construction, and it just depends on where you see value. We want to improve efficiency, we want to make sure that we're at least getting cost certainty, and then potential to reduce cost and rework and just have schedule certainty. We have so much infrastructure that is necessary. When I travel the world, I'd like to see a safer construction site. And it shocks me with all the technology we have, I see people out there doing unsafe practices.

I've seen ladies barefoot tying rebar in other countries. I've seen almost older people and younger people trying to figure out what to do when we all in the world technology exists where I can order a pizza right now on my watch, see when it goes in the oven, find out when it's out, know that it's going to travel here, the license plate and the picture of the delivery person. And before they come to that door, I can walk there and open it before they ring the doorbell. And yet we have all this technology and we know how it's used. And I will challenge you to think how can we use that expected experience of how you do everything else and apply it to our industries?

In order to do that, we have to educate the digital natives., the young people and the people that are changing industries to really enable them to do more in our space. Why is this happening now? Well, McKinsey did a report, if you didn't read it a couple of years ago that said, in the next 10 to 15 years more than almost half of what we do is going to be industrialized construction. I giggled because I thought, well in some buildings like data centers and hospitals and it's already more than 45% that's move that direction.

But what was most interesting is they said-- whoops, let me go back. What was most interesting is they said, see that up there at the top, Product Based Approach? They said in the next one to three years, that'll be the most impactful future industry dynamic. People will stop doing process based on assumption based design, designing things without really understanding how they're made. And products will be made to start informing design.

We did a little study recently of our customers. 82% of our customers considered themselves convergence customers no longer just working in one silo, and 79% said they were on a journey to productize their processes of either design or construction. We are all on this journey together. And why? Because look, we're all looking for better outcomes.

I want the expected experience for my construction project, my design capability to be just like I know the person showing up at my door or my Uber comes and the rating of that person before I get in who knows my name, I know theirs, and I know where we're all going. We need that data, but we have that technology now. We just have to teach people how to use it in both academia and industry because it's the way we interact with that technology that's really changing. So think about that.

I have a friend who owns a big company in mechanical contracting. He was trying to go paperless on signature approvals for three years. His team, big task force, couldn't figure it out, impossible, can never be done. COVID hit, three days later, they have no paper signatures. The technology did not change in three days. The way we expected to experience that technology that we would use it like everything else in your life.

Think about this when you do things in this world these days. We want to actually have all these outcomes, but we already have them everywhere else in our life. I don't go on amazon.com and guess what things will cost and when it's going to come. I actually have generative design.

They say, Amy-- everyone knows I like shoes by the way-- they say, you should buy those shoes, this dress, and that necklace, it goes well together. That's generative design bundling. And it says, by the way, you bought that necklace two years ago. Buy this alternate necklace. I don't have any of that in construction right now, but you should leave here with an expected experience that the people coming up in the world want that and we can give it to them.

And you have to think about how we transform. So as Autodesk we're on a transformation now from a product company to a platform company. Many of the companies that you work for and your universities are in a transformation process. You have to first ask yourself, do you have the foundation to do that, the process, the culture, the skills, the tools? That's why we're building cloud information models in Fusion format and flow. That's our foundation on the Autodesk platform services.

You have to think about-- any one of you could go out and buy a very expensive robot in your factories, Fab shops, construction company right now, but would it do something for you? Do you have the right understanding of that six axis armed robot? Or would it be like my Peloton which gets very dusty because I don't use it because I just don't have the culture in my house to exercise every day? Or it's going to make a lot of scrap faster that you don't need?

We have to productize both the physical and the digital. We have to think about how to connect that. We want to optimize that with things like industrialized construction because ultimately we need to get to circularity if we want the students coming through these campuses to actually have a planet to live on.

Digital waste exponentially leads to physical waste. I'm going to say that again. Digital waste exponentially is leading to physical waste, which is why we have 40% in our landfills that's construction waste. Here's one of the exciting parts.

I didn't make any money in the boom of the internet, by the way. Right now if this is my phone, you have basically Apple in your hands at Autodesk. On my Apple phone lives Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. They all do something similar. You have the opportunity on the Autodesk platform to build digital, connective tissue in these apps on the Autodesk platform services that could be worth as much as Waze or more, or Spotify, or WhatsApp living on this platform right now.

Imagine a young person that we can't get to come and work in a construction site to change their mindset and be like, I want to be in construction because I could build the next construction app worth $1,000,000,000. That's where we're at right now. That's the opportunity if you're a company.

I ask companies how many of them were building software the other day in the CEO leadership meeting. 7 out of 8 people in my group were all building their own software. Think about it. And there are jobs that we have never even heard about that are going to come up.

Data scientists are needed. Computational designers are needed. By the way, these are real titles I pulled off LinkedIn right now. These are titles that people have right now on LinkedIn. I just looked at a few of my friends names. That's real, right?

We didn't have VPs of industrialized construction, or directors of offsite innovation, or offsite construction leaders, systems lead, DfMA engineering. We didn't have that five years ago. There was no wish of mine to be the queen of prefab when I grew up. I don't know what the next jobs are going to be, but they certainly won't be what the jobs of today are that we're training people for. These are real jobs. I want you to start thinking about what the next title. By the way, if you're in this space, I don't care what your age is, you can carve a path right now that doesn't exist and be the next Queen of prefab if you want to be.

That is probably a good primer on what we're doing. I'm happy to take any questions, and I'll be here afterwards as well. Thank you. Thank you.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Thank you, Amy.

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So now, we'll transition over to the panel discussion, and we basically have three questions framed up starting with curriculum, just understanding current state, and then what's it going to take to move forward to enable industrialized construction? So that's the first question. The second question is exploring the opportunities for industry and academic partnership to enable industrialized construction. And the third question is surrounding the students. We need to create that pipeline of the future workforce. So that's what's on tap.

And then after that, we'll introduce the overview of the industrialized construction curriculum, and then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. So let's continue here. So again, what are some of the challenges for integrating industrialized construction in an across curriculum? And I'd like to start with Dr. Khalid from Qatar University. He's the Dean of the College of Engineering.

And maybe before you answer what the challenges are, can you tell us why Qatar University is investing in industrialized construction? I think understanding the why first before understanding the how would be very helpful for this audience.

DR. KHALID NAJI: OK. Thank you, John. Well, at Qatar University, first of all, I would like to put the academic requirements for IC, I would group it as the academic ecosystem. And that ecosystem, it should work together. Curriculum is the huge, the biggest part of it. Also, how the IC it will be integrated with the different programs and disciplines within the College of Engineering is extremely important, how it will fit the different components of technology and across the-- we have nine programs in the undergraduate.

So what are the necessary components for each really emerging technology, and what is the right dose to be given to the students? This is very important. The most important part is also what I call it the part of the ecosystem is the infrastructure. So you need to have the right labs, the right tools, gadgets, you name it-- software, hardware. Also, the human resources, very important. The TAs, they have the right tools and they are well acquainted with the how to use the latest technology and research technology. This is extremely important.

And also the buy in process is extremely important from the faculty because they need to believe in the IC. Most of the times as we are working in silos, but having one integrated project probably at the capstone level, this will work very well with the different programs in the College of Engineering. We usually receive a persistence like criticism from the industry that you have top students in design. They are top in terms of, well acquainted with the basic principles and everything, but when it comes to technology, they need to be at the edge with the industry. And this is extremely important. This is very important.

Also, the most important part is the surrounding teaching pedagogies. At that part of the world still, the lecture base is very common, but we are switching gradually to project based or problem based learning. And this is really, it needs the right setup for the classrooms and furniture, everything. To have the right policy for also giving the faculty and the TAs and the students the right incentive for that because it's time consuming.

So this is called like the academic ecosystem. All of this should work together. And I believe for the IC curriculum [? Vestas ?] to show its value to have a certificate like to the senior level of the H program. So these are the challenges within the academic.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Thank you for sharing. Dr. Sawhney, you serve as an adjunct faculty member at several institutions. What are you seeing in your space here in the US?

DR. ANIL SAWHNEY: John, thank you. I have a lot to say, so let me know when time is up. First thing is most of these challenges are self-inflicted-- industry, academia, we have done this to ourselves. I remember teaching at Arizona State University of course on scheduling. I would pick up project based, yeah, sure. So I'll pick a new project and assign it to my students. Didn't care what the estimating class was teaching as a project, because if I use the same project, perhaps you could connect estimating with scheduling. So some of those minor issues I think are self-inflicted.

The second thing that moved me into thinking broadly about IC, both in the industry and academia, is a study, Amy, that links back to one of the slides that you showed. So many new roles, so many new roles, the study done in the UK, most of these new roles are being filled by experts outside of our domain because we can't find people in our own domain. We have not built up the skills and competencies in our own sector to get those people. And this happened before to us.

I don't know how many of you recall during the housing bubble, I used to work a lot with home builders and lean production and all those things were coming up in home building at that time. What were the homebuilders doing because they couldn't find experts on production, on lean and those kinds of things? They were bringing folks from outside of our sector to help our sector. Nothing wrong with that.

But I think in the broad run if we continue that path, we're going to keep on hitting on these emerging new ideas that are innovative will always find lacking people skills and competencies. So that was the biggest shift that took me into thinking, why couldn't we bring industry and academia together and do something? And to me, industrialized construction is like yoga-- it's not simple. It seems simple, but it's quite complex. And you need to bring all the stakeholders together to make it work. And that's one of the bigger challenges of industrialized construction and spreading it in curriculum.

Ideally, Amy, I'd like to see the slide that you had on the house of industrialized construction mimicked by our academic colleagues. A similar house and how that fits into curriculum probably should be created so that we can at various parts and pieces can be put into various programs modules and courses so we can start building again the skills and competencies. In my current role, I have this nice way, I can be an academic one day or I can work with large global companies I'm involved throughout ICS.

I know the time. Sorry, I'm going to stop. So interact with projects and great exports globally who are thinking along the same lines. Most of the time we end up discussing skills and competencies.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Thank you, Dr. Sawhney. We'll move on to the next question. And I'm sure this was probably one of the primary reasons why you're here today is just understanding how academia and industry can collaborate together to advance industrialized construction. So I would like to begin with Andrew. You're an employer of a specialty contracting firm with prefabrication capabilities. Where do you see the opportunity for collaboration with academia?

ANDREW: I think what IC does is it opens up to a diversity of potential studies or different programs within universities where now as an employer I have interest in those graduates that if I was just a historical or legacy construction company, I might have less interest. Let me give you some examples of that. I want software developers now. I want industrial engineers. I want manufacturing engineers.

I want people that can productize. I want people that can look at how do we improve our flow on our floor? We have 100,000 square feet of space dedicated to prefabrication and manufacturing. And my goal and the goal of our organization is that we're not doing construction in a warehouse. That is not where we're trying to go.

So what that means is we need expertise, knowledge, and capabilities beyond what those who have come up, either experientially or through their academic pursuits, purely through a construction or civil engineering curriculum. It's different, so much so that I went back to school to learn about things like supply chain, one piece flow, lean manufacturing because I really do see that this is the future. And also, industry has needs as it relates to research development and testing. And academia has facilities to be able to do that.

There are two different projects-- one that we're doing with the University of Illinois-Chicago and one that we're doing with Lawrence Tech University just North of Detroit, where industry is providing funding for research because there is a desire to try to answer questions that are applicable to how we intend to do work or the performance of products that we're developing. And so I think there's a unique opportunity there where, rather than-- and I there's a traditional path of grant writing to some governmental institutions-- industry doesn't need that much elaborate application, they want results. Not necessarily specifying, hey, we want you to do this research and for these dollars, give us these results. But there's a desire to get going and get through the process.

And I think it's a very unique opportunity for academia and those who are in that space to work with industry. So we want diversity of skill sets. And even as Dr. Khalid said, we would be very interested, I am as an employer. And we are as an organization if people had graduate certificates or some sort of certificate in IC that I understood that they then had exposure and demonstrated capability and knowledge in a broader scope beyond just a singular focus that might be their primary degree.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah. Awesome, thank you. I'm going to go to Amy here. Even before this session, we were talking about how to go from one level to another. Like--

AMY MARKS: Right.

JOHN HERRIDGE: --you call it I think a journey map. Can you expand on that? Because you see an integral opportunity to bring academia into that journey map process.

AMY MARKS: I think we're a software company moving to a platform company. So what does that mean? In the past you wanted some outcome, you bought a software, you clicked a button and you had it. That's not what industrialized construction is.

Think about all what you just said. You're moving from being a traditional subcontractor, maybe you had a fabrication facility under a warehouse, but you really want to be a manufacturer. There's not one product you can sell somebody that will get you to that place. There are solutions along the way that have many different layers of capabilities and workflows and integrations of many different products just to get on a connected data environment to then understand how to productize and do process development and have integrated factory modeling potentially and even automation and robotics and process planning. That's a future state.

I always say what do you want to be when you grow up? Andrew wants to be a manufacturer, and he's getting his PhD. He wants to get a PhD in IC. So we have to think about this as a future state, and you have to take the first concrete step of action to that future state.

I'll tell you my opinion of how we can work together. You have to have a personal connection to the why. My mom was the Dean of Students at a university. My sisters are all teachers. We did this curriculum in a time in which we could have just said we're too busy, but it was very, very important.

And we decided all of us writing to open source it, not for one university, but for all people and all the industries and all people to do it. And that was a personal choice and a personal push to get it done. And I remember owning a factory in the past. I owned a steel and concrete, volumetric modular factory and assembly. I had PhD students.

You don't have to do this part, but I had them living in my home for a month at a time. I would cook dinner for all of them and teach them how to do their own laundry, but they were working in my factory where we did four dimension simulation for crane simulation of how to pick and move all these modules through the job sites. They were doing industrial engineering through my factory.

Somebody has to feel that we want to do better. One person, it starts with one. Some personal drive that makes you want to understand that this could be better, but you can make it better. One of you can make it better for your company or your university, and you have to feel that drive to do something.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah, absolutely. If Dr. Issa was here, he would speak of this idea-- we're familiar with providing students summer internship opportunities. And what he was advocating for was faculty and educators need an externship with companies to see industrialized construction hands-on or at least to observe it, so they can bring that knowledge firsthand back to the classroom, share it with the students, curate case studies, and help grow this body of knowledge faster. So that's another opportunity. I'm encouraging industry to reach out to academia in those ways so we can scale and go faster.

AMY MARKS: By the way, I'm 51. I always say my age. You don't have to say your age. I have a reverse mentor at Autodesk. He's in his 20s. I would encourage you all to get a digital native reverse mentor so that you understand the expected experience of somebody who's 23, what they want to come to a company and actually experience.

They should ask every day, why do you do that? Doesn't make any sense. That's not how I order my pizza. Get a reverse mentor as well from within or outside your organization.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Dr. Khalid or Anil, do you have any thoughts back--

DR. ANIL SAWHNEY: I just wanted to add one small piece of information which is about 15 years ago, as I was working in academia, you could sense correctly or incorrectly that perhaps academia was slightly ahead of what industry was doing. But I think it's gone now. What we are seeing happening in industry, given my role I can see both sides now, is pretty much in parallel to what's happening or perhaps academia is a step or two behind the innovation that's taking place in our sector today.

So it makes even more sense for both stakeholders to come together and I guess pick on each other's strengths. Each side is going to have its own constraints. In academia you can't do certain things. You can't convince the accreditation agencies to perhaps take leap steps and change the curriculum completely.

Given those constraints, the common good between the two stakeholders is so huge. The time has come to work together, especially in a paradigm like industrialized construction.

AMY MARKS: Can I add one last quick thing?

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah.

AMY MARKS: It's not just academia and industry. It's government, academia, and industry, policymakers. I worked in Singapore for many years. The policymakers in Singapore at the BCA actually changed the landscape of that country.

And because we had the credibility of academia, industry and academia could go to the authority having jurisdiction and they made real change. You want real change, you need all three of them.

DR. ANIL SAWHNEY: Absolutely.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Dr. Khalid, you have anything?

DR. KHALID NAJI: We have one academic head of department, he will argue with you about the industry. We'll do that after lunch. We had one good example almost about three years ago, which is, it was some sort of the capstone project but across five different departments-- architecture, civil, electrical, mechanical. So they started with the complete, started from the concept design through all the design process, through all the planning, management. And we got stuck in the execution.

And in fact, we were discussing that like a couple of days ago. So how we can repeat? So this is one way that you need to have the policy that it will bring all the departments across all disciplines to work together in one project. This is number one.

The second point is to get the right policy that it will really enforce that academic institutions to extend the internship of the students. And tangible for students are typical according to [INAUDIBLE] accreditation bodies and all of that. Right now we have it in our engineering programs is no more than 2 to four months. And now we are looking to increase it like two or extra more summer internship.

And also to engage the students with real projects. But you have to have the right also industry showcases that who are implementing IC r in the first place.

AMY MARKS: By the way, Dr. Issa would say, by the Go Gators, right? We're both gators, University of Florida undergrad. But I would say Dr. Issa would also say industry is important to-- they've had an endowment around AI. And so that red thread for the University of Florida is that they have AI type programming across all those disciplines to create one project because you're not going to do AI in silos across those areas.

So industry provided some capital, and they now have a red thread to pull across for projects using AI.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Absolutely. All right, so for time's sake we're going to move on to the last question scheduled for the panel which is how can academia industry make industrialized construction attractive to students? And I like to begin with Andrew again. What are those essential skills students and professionals need to thrive in process supporting industrialized construction?

ANDREW: I think again what it does is it opens up to a diversity of different backgrounds and interests that now can plug in or be part of an industry that for those of us who have lived it or studied it has been historically slow to change, but it's changing rapidly. And I think certainly the ability of human capital is driving that largely in our business, which was labor intensive. So we are looking for software engineers. We're looking for industrial engineers.

We're looking for people that can help with supply chain and process flow because we have to find a way to be as efficient as we possibly can. And this all feeds in through, in my mind, industrialize construction and how that's going to change the landscape going forward. So I think the future state of what we and industry want for our companies or for the industry as a whole to me is a poll for individuals who traditionally may not have gone into construction, or saw that as dirty, or not as productive, or not as sleek.

I'm a fourth generation construction person. It is what's in my blood, it's what I know. There was never any doubt in my mind that that's what I wanted to do, but I would say that doesn't resonate with everybody. But as an industry, we need people as we look to deliver our products and projects of the future in a way that's radically different than we've always done it.

AMY MARKS: Like the way everyone does everything else today, but for us.

ANDREW: Yeah.

AMY MARKS: By the way, we don't have a problem just pulling people to the space. You know you could be an Instagram model these days and make more money than I do. And you don't even have to apply for a job and you can go on TikTok. There's the kid that digs. There's 6 billion hashtags on TikTok of welding right now on TikTok.

If you don't have social media integrated into technology into your business to get some of these people on camera so we can see people doing things, think about that as well. These people-- kids, women, aside from all the normal stuff, yes we want them to be near their daycare, and that would help. And we want them to be near their university working. That would help.

How about they want to entertain and use their position to get out in the world and see people like they do in every other part of their lives? How many of you-- not too many people under 30 in the room-- took a picture on Instagram for this week? Raise your hand if you took a picture for social media this week? Only a couple of you.

By the way, if you guys were under 30, every single one of you would have raised your hand. That they took some picture to promote themselves at this conference doing something. We have to think about what is going to attract people to want to come here and how they live their regular lives.

They want to be seen. They want to show the work they're doing. They want to work with technology. They want to do all of that. We have to see you. They have to see women getting up doing things on stage.

They have to see young people working with drones, and tablets, and exoskeletons, and robotics. We need to showcase that so we can even attract them to want to go get a job, let alone come and work in our space.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah. Yeah, because I know you're a big advocate for diversity and--

AMY MARKS: 100%. Diversity and perspective, not just diversity and gender and ethnicity, right?

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah.

AMY MARKS: Look, we are at what? 9% in the construction space, 3% in trades in the US for women. We are in a skilled labor shortage right now. And I always say it like this, maybe you'll be offended-- stop talking about my 14-year-old, you don't have time to wait for her.

We have women that had babies that need to come back or women that changed industries after COVID or people have diverse perspectives that need to come to a new place. Let's focus on them right now. You can focus on my 14-year-old later, right? Not saying you shouldn't focus on kids, but we have a need.

Right now we're in critical emergency situation. By the way, in Hollywood there was a documentary called This Changes Everything. They had better numbers than us and the EEOC stepped in for women in director roles. They had better numbers than us.

We are in an emergency situation if you can't understand that. And why do I say that? Not because we need to make more money. People don't have houses, they don't have hospitals, they don't have digital infrastructure. We have a responsibility to provide that to people on this planet.

And if we can, we should. Don't you believe that? I can't walk over another homeless person in my country or anybody else's. I can't see another person who can't get on the internet for their school when it went digital because they didn't have a data center nearby. Please be moved to do something to bring people here.

JOHN HERRIDGE: Absolutely.

DR. ANIL SAWHNEY: John, can I?

JOHN HERRIDGE: Yeah.

DR. ANIL SAWHNEY: Any students in the room? No. If IC was available when I was an undergraduate student five years ago, I won't tell you my age, I would love to get trained in industrialized construction as a student. So I think it's very attractive in my view for students who are digital natives, want to play with data.

I am working on global focus groups speaking to cost estimators globally with a company from China called [? Glodon. ?] Spoke to a guy in Hong Kong who says the amount of the value of data that's sitting for him in Excel spreadsheets is just incredible, but it's so fragmented because it's in Excel spreadsheets. So he's just hired a guy in Hong Kong, an undergraduate student who knows Python, and can take that data and convert it literally into wisdom which means money for him.

So he can benchmark not only cost, but carbon data and all those things. So I think because IC is not a tool, it's not one thing, it's really a paradigm, there's so many things that you can do within it. Even as a student, robotics, mechatronics, data, AI, just modeling and simulation and so many things, I think it makes it attractive if we present it to the students in the right way, in a modular way where they can pick and choose pieces that are of interest to them.

AMY MARKS: By the way, they watch 1 minute soundbites on TikTok. If you can't do that, we're in trouble.

DR. KHALID NAJI: If you allow me, John, also, by default it's attractive to the students who are really attached to the gadgets and software. But one very important education strategy is to show them the difference, without that piece of technology, how much that construction process would cost you in terms of time, in terms of resources, in terms of extra hidden costs and all of that. This is very important. This is considered to be vital for the IC is to show them if we don't have that piece of technology, what would be the case?

AMY MARKS: If we don't have them. By the way, quick one. My friend in the middle of-- you should listen to this one-- my friend in the Midwest who needs people, you need people, right? She made an escape room on wheels for electrical prefabrication with a big TV screen on the outside. It says come inside. And they have electrical skill set for prefab.

And they have to escape room like that they have to escape out of the room by doing all these skills. And it says escape the room, enter your career. They have a big barbecue attached. And they're taking it to places like rodeos and to farmland and places where kids are so they want to come into the escape room.

And you know what they're doing when they sign somebody up? It's like a big sports thing. They put them in front of their logo and they say, they're signing up as an electrician with my company. And they put it on Instagram, and they put it on LinkedIn, and they put it everywhere just like they were a sports kid getting a football scholarship.

They're signing up plumbers and electricians like that now because these kids want to be on camera, showing the fact that they signed up to be a carpenter and that they escaped the room to do what you do, right? We got to attract these people with smaller modules, with technology, with showing them they can make a difference with innovative ways that we never had to do before.

We used to say just turn in your resume, right? We can't. That's not working anymore.

JOHN HERRIDGE: All right. So we need to--

AMY MARKS: Move on.

JOHN HERRIDGE: --keep going. So we're going to move into an overview of our industrialized construction curriculum. We launched this back in February. And there's two flavors. One is brand new this week. We have an online course.