Building for the futuren

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

MARK MULVILLE TALKS ABOUT TAKING OVER THE SCHOOL OF SURVEYING AND CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT AT TU DUBLIN IN THE MIDST OF A LOCKDOWN, HIS PLANS FOR THE SCHOOL, AND WHAT MAKES A GOOD SURVEYOR.

Mark Mulville took over from Tom Dunne as Head of the School of Surveying and

Construction Management at Technological

University (TU) Dublin in April, so had the unenviable task of beginning a new role during lockdown.

With approximately 1,200 students and 45 staff, the School offers a range of programmes from level 6 to 10, in construction management,

INTERVIEW

Ann-Marie Hardiman Managing Editor, Think Media geographic science, quantity surveying and real estate. Even before Covid, the School was undergoing a major transformation as part of the transition of DIT Bolton St to TU Dublin. Mark is conscious of the need to retain the School’s identity within the new structures: “We’re bringing three institutions together. A lot of change is going to happen. My role is to make sure that the disciplines I represent are reflected, that the importance of them will be front and centre”. It’s been a time of change among staff too, with the retirement of Tom Dunne and Martin Hanratty, the former Head of Real Estate at the School, and new appointments too: “We lost a huge amount of experience and knowledge, but Tom and Martin left the School in a really good place. We’ve also had new appointments to the School’s senior leadership such as Dr Frank Harrington as Real Estate Discipline Lead and Ruairi Hayden as Construction Management and Geomatics Discipline Lead, so we’ve got a very strong team. I’m really looking forward to working with them”.

A different kind of change A strong team will be needed in the coming months, as the School, like every other learning institution, goes through what Mark calls “the largest change higher education’s ever faced”.

The School is moving online as much as possible, and Mark praises the teaching team for how they have risen to this massive IT challenge. Social distancing will be implemented when staff and students need to attend in person. There are also particular challenges around the surveying equipment needed by students and staff for the field work that is an essential part of many programmes, and strict hygiene protocols have been put in place. For Mark, however, ensuring that students are supported is perhaps the most important thing of all: “Students come to university not just for the programme, they come for the experience, and we’re conscious that September is going to be a very different experience for them. One of the things we’ve done is that each first-year group will have additional support through year tutors and remote learning advisors”. An open door policy has always been central to the School’s ethos: “Students should feel they can go and talk to their lecturer outside of the classroom. That’s been taken away from us, so we’re working really hard to make sure they know how to contact us, and that we’re available to help them”. Many of the School’s programmes also involve work placements. With companies operating new protocols and staff working from home, providing the training and mentoring needed by a student will be difficult. And as the sector contracts, the work may not be there. Mark points out that the sector has experienced troughs before, most recently in the last recession, and the School has plans in place to ensure students are facilitated as much as possible: “Most of our students have secured placements. Once they start, there may be cases where placements disappear, because of the industry or because the employer struggles to provide that support. If an employment situation or a placement breaks down, we have a contingency in place around what the student can do to meet our learning outcomes”. Team player Mark came to surveying via what he calls a “meandering route”. He originally studied architectural technology, and worked in the architectural industry for a number of years, before the recession prompted a move to the UK. Over time he moved to more of a building surveying role, and then decided to follow a long-cherished ambition to move into education, beginning as a lecturer in the University of Greenwich in London. On his return to Ireland in 2017, he took up a role in the then DIT in Bolton St, and became Head of School in April of this year. A Shelbourne fan, he was a frequent visitor to Tolka Park in pre-Covid times, but these days he satisfies his love of football by enjoying a kickabout with his three-year-old son.

School plans Under normal circumstances, an interview with a new Head of School would begin by asking about their plans for the institution they are now leading, but these are far from normal circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s important to think about the future: “At TU Dublin we have a new strategic plan, which is focused on ‘People, Planet, Partnership’, aligned with the UN Strategic Development Goals. As a school of surveying and construction management, these are areas where we are front and centre in terms of the built environment and its impact on the environment, and on people. In terms of partnership, that is really strong in our engagement with industry, but we also have formal relationships with Purdue University in the US, RMIT in Australia and others around Europe”. Mark’s plans for the School encompass both the undergraduate and postgraduate offerings. One of the key elements is the expansion of the “earn as you learn” offering. As someone who began his career in industry and moved into education later

(see panel), Mark is aware that not everyone comes to education by the traditional routes: “We have an ethos of lifelong learning. The earn as you learn programme is something Dr Alan Hore developed on the quantity surveying side and it’s been really successful, so we’re looking to expand it across the other disciplines”. In this part-time, five-year programme, students spend part of the week in classes, and the rest in employment. They earn an income, while gaining a professional qualification alongside extensive work experience: “All of our students will be successful hopefully, but the students who have that industry experience are different because they have the opportunity to apply learning from the classroom on a daily basis. It also gives the industry people they can work with and develop as they complete their education”. Mark is keen to expand the School’s postgraduate programmes as well: “We have a number of MSc offerings at the moment, and we’d like to expand that, into building surveying certainly, possibly project management as well. With building surveying, there is a gap in terms of availability of programmes and we want to fill that gap. It’s about giving people that career path – being a construction manager, a quantity surveyor or working in the geomatics or real estate field and wanting to develop to the next level”. Research is also key, and the School’s postgraduate programme includes PhD offerings: “It’s very much industry-focused research into the problems we are facing today, but also with an eye to the future and how technological developments may enable improvements across the industry. We want to try and help to solve them in partnership with industry. We also need to work with our industry partners to get more women into the surveying and construction disciplines and this will be embedded alongside programme development and research in our School Strategy”. Mark and his colleagues believe that all of these factors feed into the range of skills that make a good surveyor: “We do the technical piece very well, but we’re not just teaching students for the first four years, we’re educating them for a career, so it’s got to be much broader than that. It’s important to have a very good set of soft skills for communication, and to have resilience. We know within our industry things can be difficult at times. Having the resilience to deal with that is really important. Our graduates need to have the facility to think critically when faced with a challenge. I think in our industry, we sometimes fall into a trap of doing what we did last time. We use a contract type or technical solution because that’s what we did last time, and it was okay in that scenario. If we have students who have that combination of the underpinning of technical knowledge, combined with those soft skills, resilience, critical thinking, you’ve got a wellhigh environmental standard, or refurbishing existing buildings, but if you go out of urban centres the economies of scale disappear, and it’s more difficult to justify the investment. It is those practical, real world challenges that I would like to see the School help to address. When we’re talking about sustainability it’s not ‘oh we should do this because it’s a good thing to do’. It’s ‘we should do this because it’s a good thing to do and here’s how you make the “OUR GRADUATES NEED TO HAVE THE FACILITY TO THINK CRITICALLY WHEN FACED WITH A CHALLENGE. rounded professional who can challenge the business case’”. status quo and help drive the industry forward and ultimately that’s what we should be delivering”. The School has always had a strong engagement with the SCSI, and that’s something Mark is keen to see continue: “A lot of my colleagues are involved in many different committees and panels within the SCSI and, of course, we have partnered on CPD and programme delivery over the years. For us it’s important to have that relationship because it’s another way to engage with the industry through the professional body. It’s really beneficial for us to sit at that table with representatives of the industry and make sure we have a full understanding of the challenges facing industry, thus helping to maintain our currency”.

A sustainable future for society and surveying Before there was Covid, there was the climate crisis. How we plan and build will be crucial to how we tackle this, and how we educate future professionals is therefore crucial too. While Mark says sustainability is embedded right across the School’s programmes, there’s always more to be done: “We want to address it in a real, tangible way. We’ve made huge improvements in recent years – moving to NZEB will make a difference – but there’s still a big challenge there, particularly with existing buildings. We had an undergraduate student this year who looked at implementing high levels of energy efficiency and what they pointed out was that you can make the argument in an urban centre about building new buildings to a very Sustainability is not just about design and construction, but also about the operation of buildings and ultimately performance in use: “There’s a risk that if we focus just on energy and CO2, we build in other problems because we haven’t taken a holistic view of what we’re doing. Our students need to have that rounded overview, to understand the impact of the decisions they make”. All of this ties in with the question of what the future holds for the profession, and the industry. For Mark it’s about filling the skills gaps, and working to make the industry more efficient, more productive, and better able to absorb the ups and downs that lie ahead: “Arguably, the industry has an issue with productivity, lagging behind other industries, and that’s not just an Irish problem. Although we have made significant strides in recent years to further improve productivity, digitisation, in terms of the way we communicate and share information, is going to be really important. It’s thinking about how we do things smarter, thinking lean, and

using the technologies that are available to us”. He acknowledges that there will always be some fear of change, but the School and TU Dublin have a role to play here too: “If you implement high levels of prefabrication, for example, you potentially lose jobs because there are certain on-site skills you don’t need, but it also creates opportunities. That’s where the university comes in; we’re there to help those people find that route through another part of their profession where there is more opportunity to develop”.