Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Job Market in Building Design
Many people will be made redundant. Some building sites will never re-open. A lot of money will have been lost. What is going to remain though is all of your professional skills, which now have to be showcased to the right individuals. If you step well on this uneven path, you can walk out from the crisis with your head held high.
Get an Edge
The world has slowed down due to COVID-19, but it has not come to a complete stop. The economy is still ticking, just at a slower pace. This is the perfect moment for you to re-visit your personal brand and how you want to stand out in the post-pandemic job market. The opportunities will definitely be there, as once the lockdown restrictions are removed, many businesses will bounce back up. However the HR departments are likely to be very selective when hiring new staff, as the number of job openings is going to be dictated by the financial health of organisations post-crisis. This yields only one conclusion:
competitiveness will increase
Reducing costs
How is the business world likely to react to the economic downturn? In order to stay afloat, companies have already began searching for saving opportunities. One of the biggest costs, apart from payroll, is renting an office. Browsing HubbleHQ reveals the bill can be over £1,600 pp/month to enjoy a flexible working desk in London, which tops all European cities in terms of pricing. Companies leasing a dedicated space can expect to pay even more. Therefore it comes as no surprise that now, more than ever, remote working is a very attractive solution for reducing monthly expenditure. Large corporations have already introduced hot-desking in the past to cope with team expansion without a need to change the premises. This solution is likely to become a new norm in all firms post-pandemic.
With fewer people being required to commute to work on daily basis, we are going to see companies looking to hire people based in other geographical locations. This trend will require many managers to re-think their ways of delegating tasks and monitoring people’s performance. The UK pandemic lockdown has forced many teams to WFH (work from home). Some individuals are coping very well, while others are experiencing a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using new digital tools required for an effective collaboration at a distance. Now it is a perfect time to master all of these workflows to ensure you
come out from the COVID-19 era as a tech-savvy professional, ready to take on a new challenge from any location.
Moving into Cloud
As a building designer you probably use a range of CAD/BIM software products, PDF viewers, spreadsheet editors and other specialised programs.
The key to working in a distributed team is using cloud-based tools, which allow multiple parties to collaborate simultaneously. You may have already heard about some of the items listed below, but let’s recap for convenience:
- Office 365 — edit office documents together with your colleagues at the same time
- Microsoft Teams — chat, video calls, channels, project planning, file management and much, much more
- OneDrive — cloud based file storage
- Autodesk BIM 360 — view building models in a web browser, coordinate designs in Revit from anywhere, manage project documentation and more
- Bluebeam Revu — edit, markup and organise PDFs to communicate your design intent across the team using any device
Diving into advanced features of all of these software products will go a long way towards increasing effectiveness of your workflows.
There are many YouTube tutorials and how-to videos, which you can watch to increase those tech skills. When new remote-based staff is hired into an organisation, it is vital to ensure there are right cyber security protocols in place when granting people access to any cloud software environment.
While the road ahead is definitely going to reveal some unexpected turns of events, make the most out of your time right now and start building strong foundations for the next move. In the economy full of uncertainty, it is likely many companies will opt in for working with freelancers. We have seen businesses moving into flexible office spaces, and now we may witness a strong shift towards flexible workforce. Reducing the number of fixed monthly costs and scaling operations up, or down, depending on the current projects pipeline, is definitely going to be one of key topics in many boardrooms this summer, or sooner.
Checklist
To stay ahead of the upcoming trend shift curve, below is a list of steps you may want to begin taking this week:
- Identify your strengths and newly obtained skills
- Revisit your best projects and prepare a portfolio
- Work on your personal brand
- Make your LinkedIn profile standout
- Update your CV
- Identify key players in the market, who are likely to remain strong post-pandemic
- Acquire further skills by completing online training (Udemy, Harvard University)
- Network with relevant people online
New Opportunities
Every event in the history has created new opportunities. The global pandemic of coronavirus is something businesses will remember for years to come as the force for a drastic change. While companies quickly adapt to new circumstances, individuals should also take appropriate steps towards self-development.
“We will meet again”
When we all come back to our normal ways of living, the lessons learnt from the lockdown, and the industry-wide remote working, will definitely lead to further operational improvements across many firms. These are surely interesting times to live in.
