Our last article was intended to start a discussion, just what is a Construction Technologist (“CT”) now and what will role look like in 5 years?

The post floated out into the Interwebs and drew a nice response across social channels. Let’s continue the conversation by highlighting additional points that have brought up by the community as it relates to the evolution of the construction technologist.

One thread of the conversation was about where Construction Technologist would come from?

Josh Bone brought up a common theme in our industry. The answer is generally: It depends. People find their way to this role from both construction and tech and evolve with the job as it grows and defines itself.

Another interesting point was how the CT role draws some comparisons from other areas of technology and can tend to be a melting pot of disciplines:

Ryan Hoggatt said that the CT is “a translator that can speak both geek and constructor” and Walker B. Lockard says “I’m one geeky dude, but I’ve found bad processes stifle innovation more than bad tech does” eluding to the fact that he has to be able to speak to the operations side to be able to understand and perhaps guide processes in a better direction.
This draws a parallel that Jeff Sample points out, “this feels like the early days of DevOps” or a Systems Analyst from Software Development. The people that work to grease the wheels between tech and operations and strive to connect the dots.
Weston Tanner posed several questions regarding why BIM may be central to the Construction Technologist role, but that doesn’t necessarily mean VDC.

To round out the whole discussion, Mike Gadus, Jonathan Marsh and Travis Voss decided to have a call and talk about how best to evolve the Construction Technologist discussion acrossed a broad set of construction industry peers.

The notion of starting a Construction Technologist peer group was floated, and it was quickly pointed out that such a group would need to be open and inclusive in order to assure perspectives from across the built world value chain.

All stakeholders in the built environment welcome. The A, the E, the C, and the O. GCs, trades, union, nonunion, technology providers. It’s a group of construction technology peers. A place we can share ideas, questions, pains, solutions.

So what happens next?

There is somewhat of an informal network forming already as we all go to these shows and have talks. Should we create a formal organization? Leverage some different online tools to create a virtual network and try to connect people at events across the country and the various verticals?

So now the ask, Tweet this out, share on LinkedIn, Facebook, among your peers. Let’s get connected. Let’s settle on a platform to connect the group, let’s charge this whole industry forward!

If you’d like to get involved, join our LinkedIn Group below or contact Travis Voss on Twitter or LinkedIn.