It was a pleasure to have: Alayna, Andrew, Charlotte, Izabela, and Joseph at our head office and on our sites from Woking College last week to enjoy a whole week of work experience with us.
All students demonstrated politeness, punctuality, enthusiasm and a clear ability to understand complex systems and processes.
Amongst many activities, during the week they learnt how to carry out take-off quantities by hand (and then verifying values via CADMeasure) during the Estimating and Surveying segment; on site they carried out site fire arrangements weekly inspections, site records and weekly health & safety checklists together with the Site Manager; with MCS’s Document Controller they learnt how projects are digitally set-up for whole project team for collaboration and then carried out the uploading of documents themselves.
Complementing their face-to-face learning, the students were challenged to undertake construction related e-learning CPD courses, including: Health & Safety Awareness training, Risk Assessment and Method Statement training and finally Carbon Reduction training via the Considerate Constructors e-learning portal, so that they could increase their knowledge on the topic of carbon reduction and what net zero means for the industry.
Speaking of her time at MCS, Charlotte said: “I have learnt about the process used to get projects and how estimating is used to figure out a price point that the project will cost and how much the construction company are owed each month for the completed work.
“I have been told how companies get put on tender lists and compete for projects, by using past projects as evidence of their quality of work and how tenders now include quantitative as well as qualitative data. So that tenders are not just based on having a low price and that in fact having a low price may result in the Client spending more money due to the price being untenable than if the Client went with the more expensive Company.”
We are still finding that some students perceive construction to be about 'being outdoors and getting dirty' and most suited to 'young people who do not get into college or university'. We want to change that perception and are passionate about nurturing the talent of tomorrow, so we welcome work experience placements.
