FIDIC Academy update

FIDIC Academy is FIDIC’s new learning and development body which has been established to deliver training in subjects relating to the consulting engineering and infrastructure industry and act as FIDIC’s centre for learning and development and associated activities. The FIDIC Academy’s mission is to be the world’s leading centre for contract and best business practice learning and development knowledge and activities within the consulting engineering industry, delivered on a global basis with FIDIC Academy as its hub.

The deployment of the FIDIC Academy learning management system (LMS) platform during 2021 has seen the number of courses rise and an increase in the number of participants and private or institutional clients. The FIDIC training offer has grown and our catalogue has expanded with new course content. Thanks to the more efficient and professional management of the training events provided by the new platform, the FIDIC training team has been able to offer 75 courses from January 2022 or planned until the end of the year. More than 2,300 participants have attended FIDIC training courses up to August 2022.

In 2022, the attendance for online courses has slightly decreased compared with the previous year, perhaps due to Zoom fatigue, but going forward we expect that the main output from the FIDIC Academy will be an offering based on the ‘massive open online course’ (MOOC) format together with live and recorded instructor-led training (ILT). Notwithstanding any move back towards in-person courses, we still expect that more than two thirds of training and education will still be online and we will offer short courses in business practices for people around the globe to access.

Our 2022 training statistics show that FIDIC organised 18 public online courses on the FIDIC Academy platform and nine public in-class courses were organised in collaboration with some of FIDIC’s member associations, from Cyprus, Jordan, Bosnia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, France and Tanzania. In countries where FIDIC has no members, like Fiji, Maldives and Malawi, public courses were provided by FIDIC to the local market. to private firms and public institutions, governments or international financial institutions. These include the World Bank (Uzbekistan, South America), USAID (Jordan), IADB (Suriname), ADB (Mongolia), Governments of Marshall Islands, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Nepal, Turkey, Zambia, Jordan, private firms like Ikea, Huawei, MAPNA Group Iran, Othman Egypt, Majed Steel Group Saudi Arabia and EDF Renewables South Africa. New courses have been proposed online for the first time on the FIDIC Academy platform, including Module 1 Advanced, the Green Book module (upcoming) and the Golden Principles module (upcoming). Training in other languages than English has also been offered on the platform, including a Spanish course on Module 1, several modules in Bulgarian and the first training in Chinese for a private firm.

Future Leaders Management Certificate programme

The Future Leaders Management Certificate (FLMC) programme started in April with 46 participants on the FIDIC Academy platform. The new platform allows for automatic test scoring and certificate issuing to successful candidates. 44 students successfully passed the test and received their certificates.

In September, a two-day FLMC meeting was organised in Geneva before the annual conference and a presentation during the Future Leaders symposium at the conference was made by FLMC participants. The seventh FLMC webinar was also organised at the end of August on the FIDIC Academy platform.

FIDIC Academy governance structure

FIDIC Academy’s governance, capital and administration is overseen by the FIDIC board. Regulation and oversight of FIDIC Academy’s course content, learning and development activities and operations is undertaken by the FIDIC Academy senate, which reports to the FIDIC board.

All trainers who deliver courses directly for FIDIC Academy need to be registered with FIDIC Academy. They are ordinarily required to obtain a FIDIC Certified Trainers Certification within one year of commencement of training

for FIDIC Academy and are subject to a code of conduct. Alternatively, trainers can be engaged via a collaboration agreement between FIDIC and the company or organisation for which they work.

Capacity building across FIDIC’s member associations (MAs), undertaken in a commercially viable manner, is also fundamental to achieving FIDIC’s objectives. Hence MAs, universities and other training bodies will also have opportunities to work with FIDIC Academy to independently deliver courses through a franchise agreement or through partnership opportunities.

As of August 2022, approximately 25 FIDIC Academy governance roles have been identified and appointments are being made. The process is expected to be completed in October 2022. Additionally, a full-time Geneva-based FIDIC Academy general manager was appointed in July 2022 with responsibility for the supervision, control and management of the academy’s day-to-day administrative, business, financial and other operational affairs.

King’s College summer school

For the second time, in June-July 2022, FIDIC provided in conjunction with King’s College London Centre of Construction Law, an intensive one-week summer school covering the FIDIC standard form of contracts in practice. This year, for the first time, this course was also run in class. The places were quickly fully booked since the training was limited to 28 participants. New modules and future developments

External training material development is also being considered with renowned course providers and experts in identified subject areas. Current collaboration discussions are progressing with reputable organisations in the field of project finance, risk management and cyber security topics. These activities have great potential for development and expansion, as FIDIC can engage in as many quality-based collaborations with partners as viable in order to create a valuable synergy and tap into the much wider market of a broad array of business practice topics, in addition to the well-known FIDIC contract courses.

Focus has also been concentrated on business practice topics, such as project finance and risk management. These topics are being considered to be delivered through collaborations with reputable organisations and their developments will also serve as pilot projects for perfecting the most suitable models of collaboration for joint delivery of topics of interest.

With the remarkably high demand and ever-increasing volume of inquiries from clients for course delivery and the expansion of FIDIC’s portfolio of course offerings, a catalogue of courses has been created, encompassing all currently available courses, which will be updated as new courses are developed and launched. It will also serve as a good source of marketing material for the FIDIC Academy for promotion and sales purposes.

FIDIC certification of past trainers

At the beginning of January 2022, the past trainers who were previously invited to go through the fast-track certification process were certified by FCL. This certification recognises the past collaboration with FIDIC trainers and establishes an updated list of FIDIC Certified Trainers that is currently published on the FCL website. See https://fcl.fidic.org/ wp-content/uploads/2022/06/FCT-listing-June-2022-1.pdf

FIDIC currently collaborates with 38 international Certified Trainers on its key contracts, 32 on the Silver Book and has ten Chinese Certified Trainers.