hi welcome to lecture 1b introduction to the construction industry i'm tom stevenson and we're going to be going through a different high level view of the construction industry essentially what it's uh all about a little bit of statistical information on the background of the construction industry uh the different sectors just so you get a really good handle of what you're getting yourself into in this program and you have a good idea of how the industry might be able to benefit you in your future careers uh construction industry i'll start off by saying is an enormous industry and as much as it's a big industry it's actually a small industry in the sense that people get to know uh people and people know people that are very good at what they do and so if you get very good at what you do you're going to have a excellent career in this sector and it's one of those sectors that you can't you can't really outsource it to another country you know i suppose some design aspects and things like that can be done that way but you know building a project you need to do it a lot of it on site there's going to be a lot more prefabrication in the future with building information modeling better known as bim i think at the end of chapter one in the understanding construction drawings text you'll see a little bit about bim and there's a chart we'll get into that in future lectures but it's a good idea to sort of understand how building information modeling is actually changing the way we do things and it's going to continue to change the way we do things so we're going to look at the various types of construction getting into the different sectors look at the stakeholders who's involved in the construction industry there are a lot of stakeholders that are involved whether we're talking about clients consultants subcontractors suppliers there's an array of people that we need to be able to identify procure coordinate work effectively with and how that integrates with the different construction models and types and contracts and regulatory authorities all these things come together so i kind of think about the construction industry like this big circle here and this big elliptical uh circle is i think of that sort of like um all the information in the universe and the construction industry is kind of like that in the sense that the universe is always expanding and as it expands uh in itself the construction industry is expanding in all the things you need to know and all the different ways of doing things and all the different materials and building systems and software systems and integrations and building automation systems that we need to understand how they work and we need to try to learn as much as we can but with that said you know there's only so much that one person can know right and there's what you know right now there's what you'll know at the end of your program and there's the there's what you know after a couple of years of working in this industry and then there's what you know after working decades in the industry and at no point are you really going to know everything and if you think you know everything that's when you got a lot of trouble right i run into people occasionally that they think they know everything and that's really telling because there's always things that you can learn even if there's something maybe one of your classes you've done this particular topic and you know it but hearing it come from somebody else gives you a different perspective and there's always these little gaps that we need to fill in our knowledge base and even no matter what company you work for i don't care if it's like snc lately pcl ellis dawn uh you know largest construction company on the planet there's things they don't know even with all of their sources so we we really have to work at if if we're in one particular sector let's say this is the sector of civil infrastructure have heavy civil and in that particular sector and we've got a project in that particular sector you know what you're not going to know everything about that project there's going to be what we call knowledge gaps and your job really especially if you're getting into the field of management is to fill those knowledge gaps you've got to figure out where those gaps are and then you've got to source the people that know the answers and you've got to filter that information and figure out is this good information or is this not so good information and today that's even harder to do unto itself because information there's so much information out there and trying to figure out what's true and what's not and what's your best pathway and strategy and tactic with this becomes quite a challenge so the way we fill those knowledge gaps uh you know between and these are some of the areas that potential areas in a project that you have to fill when we talked about stakeholders and people that are involved in your projects they could be any amount of these some of them may not be applicable to certain projects all of them may be applicable to certain projects it just depends right but you have to be able to source that information filter it and figure out your best strategy and pathway and your project team will have to interpret that information and figure out where's our best way to go so that's part of understanding the construction industry and within that knowledge area there's both soft skills and technical skills so the soft skills are the things like communication leadership any kind of interaction written communication communication can be a big topic unto itself motivation how do we how do we engage and get people engaged in our projects how do we motivate them to get what we need to have done when we need to have it done at the price freight point that we need these are all soft skills and then there's the technical skills you know structurally what does this mean what kind of rebar requirements does it have what kind of forces are coming under against this how do we develop a critical path network in a schedule these are all technical skills and we've got to combine those in the right way in the right combination to effectively get the results that we're after and if we do that really well we're going to be really good at what we do because there's a lot of people that don't do it so well or need to improve a lot okay so think of that that way and as i kind of rattled through and i'll it comes up again in a later slide institutional commercial industrial we often call these three icis so if you hear the the acronym and that's the one thing about construction this course is going to have a lot of acronyms it's trying to get a little bit used to the different uh acronyms and abbreviations that are used to identify things ici institutional commercial industrial so like an organization like the toronto construction association that's made up of thousands of construction members and consultants and all of those particular areas they really identify with ici institutional commercial industrial heavy civil tends to get into big infrastructure projects that's getting into roads bridges water treatment plants sewage treatment plants all of those type of infrastructure type projects dams hydro electric plants nuclear power plants those all would fall under that and of course we have uh oh by the way on under industrial you probably get things like oil refineries uh a manufacturing plant like a ford motor company or something like that commercials your shopping malls institutional would be like if we were at school sitting in a classroom residential this could be two full sectors unto itself because they're both so big low rise residential and high-rise high-rise you really only get or multi-story you really only get in urban centers you don't typically get a 20-story or 40-story building in a town so usually this this is more limited to your urban centers your vancouver's calgary's edmonton's toronto's winnipeg you know these kind of montreal these kind of urban centers we're used to it in toronto because they're everywhere right so it's a huge part of the construction industry in toronto and every sector has renovations right so every sector now the renovation sector is actually bigger than the new construction sector because you think of all the things that are built they constantly have to be maintained or they have to be redesigned or refitted or maybe they don't serve their original purpose so renovations is huge renovations in the low rise construction sector is you know larger than the new residential low-rise construction sector as a good example restoration work well that could be we always think of restoration work like heritage restoration like restoring casa loma or the parliament buildings and in ottawa restoration is really a big heritage restoration it's a big deal several billion dollars being spent on the parliament buildings over the next 10 to 15 years just restoring them and maintaining them the restoration sector also includes things like all of these condominium buildings that are being built all these families that are going to be moving into them well probably in about 15 20 years maybe sooner the curtain walls are going to start to leak the balcony slabs are going to start to have problems the underground parking is going to start to deteriorate that's the restoration sector so it's kind of tied to the renovation sector but it's really just restoring something back to its original purpose so the construction industry design and construction big movement towards uh building more of energy efficient environmentally sustainable buildings i think in the chapter one i've got this sort of phrase here humanity has the ability to make uh development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs this was kind of the statement that's widely used when we talk about sustainability because sometimes sustainability is hard to sort of identify with just because something is green does not mean it's sustainable green building is kind of like you're doing something above what the building code requires you to do but it doesn't mean that it's so far above that it's actually sustainable so i guess a good example would be energy star in housing energy star and housing is better than the building codes usually around 25 percent better energy efficiency than the current building code so it's a good start but it's not i wouldn't consider that sustainable because it's not necessarily at say like what net zero certification is that's another certification program where a house has to produce as much energy as it consumes right so that's how i distinguish those so i take that statement to kind of look at it from that phrase we all have to take some sort of benchmark and identify with it so that then we can sort of filter information for what it means you know if advertisers are advertising something sustainable and you're like questioning it probably good to come back to this phrase and sort of visualize that maybe it fits better in this category um so and then of course there's what we call green washing where somebody's just trying to say something's green when it's not uh i guess a good example might be some like bp oil when they were sort of advertising they're the green oil company and evidently that wasn't the case at that time with the gulf oil spill so with in the case of the construction industry i really think that if you're going to say you're doing something sustainably make sure that you are because i think you're kind of called out if you're not better not to say anything if that's the case so building to a higher more energy efficient environmentally sustainable level than is currently standard practice with the intention of eventually becoming truly sustainable so you're not quite there yet but you're trying to do better and working at getting better so when we think about the overall construction industry there's a big contrabution that's made to infrastructure so we can't be functioning as a society without all of these kind of things that we have transportation networks they're all built you know airports are built planes that need somewhere to land we need somewhere to organize people getting onto them we need some way to ship freight across the country utility services how are we going to get our water our gas our electricity communications which has become really important fundamentally too how do we ensure that we protect our buildings from flooding from rivers and rising sea levels there's all kinds of infrastructure and protections going into place regarding that you know the great lakes as we speak are at record levels and those rising shorelines they are they will cause some problems in certain areas if there's not some uh contribution to infrastructure by the municipalities uh to protect certain areas high impact areas economic and social benefits uh you know it brings a wide variety of uh economic and social benefits tons of jobs you're here in this program you're looking to make a career for yourself in this industry it has tons of economic and social benefits as a result of that it contributes to society because when we have people working it makes for a much more engaged society when we have physical improvements to infrastructure and our standards of living through having a properly built environment it has all kinds of benefits that we wouldn't even um think about just think of if we couldn't build hospitals what kind of state we would be in if we couldn't set up those kind of structures to make those kind of buildings and institutions feasible so there's a lot of you know when you really get down to it i think you're getting into an industry that is about as impactful as you can get i i often like to think about projects as the end result you'll hear me in other courses speak that way you know i try to get a vision for what is this project going to be used as when it's completed even when i was working on the construction of e-building at our campus i was trying to visualize the end building really really hard to try to visualize exactly how the students would be interacting and using the different rooms and trying to have whatever small level of influence i had for project manager of technology on that project and that's helpful i think that helps provide the best end result and that makes you much better at what you do when you can actually put yourself in the shoes of the um individuals that are going to be using the facility there's an excellent book and throughout courses you'll hear me quote different books it's just what i read a lot uh and one is uh it's called how to win friends and influence people it was written by dale carnegie in the late 1930s and that particular book um it's been recently on the new york times bestseller list so it's it stood the test of time one of the things from that book that's very interesting is uh the concept of really putting yourself in the other person's shoes and trying to look at it from their viewpoint this works really well if you're dealing with a client this works really well if you're dealing with a subcontractor or supplier and it works really well if you think about the end user of whatever it is you're constructing and how they're going to use that facility because you're going to be more attuned to making sure that that facility is going to work well for them and you're going to try to influence that no matter what your position is to have that end best end result so if i'm building a hospital i'm not just thinking about uh its walls and it's drywall and it's uh linoleum i'm thinking about patients and how they're in the rooms and how things are gonna move from room to room and how close the proximity is to the other areas architects obviously have to think about that in a big way but when you're constructing things you also need to think about it that way um so taking it uh standing in the other person's shoes and looking at it from their perspective in the case of subcontractors and clients you don't always have to agree with their point of view but it's good to understand where they're coming from because it makes it easier for you to figure out what's my best approach in trying to sell this concept or negotiate this issue and it gives you a much better understanding of things and it helps get away some personal emotions out of out of the way too we talked about the soft skills right that's part of the soft skills selling negotiating understanding human nature it's a lifelong endeavor trust me so some of the benefits as i said local areas and thinking about it in those terms that's what you're doing you're building a mental model of how this project is going to be used at the end and really then at that point you can deconstruct it piece by piece and break it break it down until you can bring it back to the beginning and then when you understand where you are at the beginning you kind of in your head sort of deconstructed it to where you're starting from and then you can reconstruct it for the best way that you think that you should build it lean construction methodology which we'll talk about later in the course looks at things from that way looking at it from the end and then breaking it down to the beginning doesn't mean then you can't take it from the beginning and work it back to the end so you don't have any gaps like we mentioned so the next few slides they kind of go through a bunch of stats i'm not going to spend too much time just reading off the stats because i think you can look at that and you can even look up even more current stats that's changed by the year this year might not be the greatest year as for most industries but surprisingly the construction industry has actually been very very resilient through this just the other day i was hearing the renovation sector they were expecting was going to be down this year by 5 to 10 percent which is not bad considering what's been going on and last year was a full-out record i think in canada it was over 100 billion dollars so you can get a sense of it and you know the nice thing about these numbers too when you think about it uh the gta greater toronto area it's the economic engine of canada it's got the largest population in canada so you can bet you can bet full throttle that the majority or the largest urban center share of these jobs is coming out of the gta in canada so it's something to be proud of and it's something that shows that there's a big opportunity for us so it is one of canada's biggest sectors uh it is uh so if construction suffers the economy suffers that's something you should know and the construction industry is a cyclical industry we'll talk more about that in the course but different sectors that we mentioned some are more cyclical than others new construction homes that would tend to be more cyclical government projects uh maybe a little bit less cyclical depends if you're in a big recession and your uh country is near bankruptcy then probably that would suffer like greece my wife's greek went through a has gone through and i'd say still is going through some tough times because they almost became insolvent and that means you can't put billions of dollars into infrastructure when the economy goes down typically governments look to construction and invest in construction infrastructure projects during down times like we did in the 2008 financial crisis so you can sort of see one-tenth of the canadian economy um a lot of construction firms it's an easy area to start a business i wouldn't say it's an easy area to be successful in that business you have to it's a very competitive environment but you can start very small people start out of the back of their pickup truck right and they can grow businesses to very very very large businesses i did a lot of consulting work with mattamy homes and we had a partnership at one time at george brown with mattamy homes great company i really admire their ceo peter gilgan had the pleasure of having dinner a few times with him and one of the things that you probably hear a few different stories i have in that area just because i spent a fair bit of time doing work there but the company started you can go on their website and see the history i think he started with one house in oakville one house became three houses three houses became six houses six houses became twelve houses uh twelve houses it basically became logarithmic right it's not linear became logarithmic pretty much the way the growth of that company came out and so went from one house i think it was around 1977 or 78 somewhere in that period to where they built probably upwards of 4 500 to 5 000 houses a year in north america so um it just shows you where you can take something from very small to very large and it can be scaled over time lots of opportunities in the construction that's one of the reasons i love it so much it's just it's just endless opportunities that way so as i said i'm not gonna i don't wanna belay this too much but you can sort of see the different stats and you can look up i think there are 2020 census that should be coming out soon they usually release them every five years or so building permits large amounts um so we can think of construction you know i think it's pretty easy to understand the process of building something the business of building things and the way something is built or made the methods and materials methodology that we use that's the other thing there's a lot of different materials and methodologies that can be used and advances that are being made that makes all of these things um exciting in lots of ways maybe if one of you remind me in the lab i'll i'll bring it up but there was i was in calgary and i had one of the project managers for calgary hospital and ellis dawn built that hospital and they were taking the course and um he was telling me about it was the other project manager site super and he was telling me about the forming system they used and we use hydraulics and this forming system because one of the things you have with a concrete is that you have a great weight and then it can sag it's going to everything sags deflects right so the forming system had hydraulics so that it would adjust itself to a level position right with the weight and that meant because of the hydraulics that were built into it they could make it long span which meant they could take out the shoring underneath much much sooner much much much sooner so they could quickly start working underneath the actual floor slabs with the forming system in place which meant that they could dramatically reduce the schedule which cut the budget on that project by i think it was around 140 million dollars i've got the article i'll look it up 140 million dollars just by changing the methodology of construction and using a new technology they actually partnered with peery forms they patented the form system together this is innovation okay and this is what the construction industry needs to be doing more there's a lot of companies and a lot of exciting things being done but we have a long way to go as you'll see i like the exciting stuff i can also tell you the other side of things where we're a little bit on the slow side with things so but that's why you're here you're going to learn how to do these things and you're going to figure out new and better ways that people like myself never even thought about so we have uh the process you know high-rise building construction the industry residential methods and materials reinforced concrete structures putting in basically the base pad you can see the construction ramp coming down this is for condominium building being built in the old canadian tire lands on shepard between leslie and bayview on the north side it kind of it's between shepard and the 401 so the 401 is actually right back here and there's about 18 to 20 buildings that's going in on the old shepherd uh entire lands that are condominiums in the range of uh 30 to 46 stories so that is that process of renewal and highest and best use that i mentioned in the chapter very important concept highest and best use it's what runs the it's the engine of what runs development uh it doesn't make sense to have a huge uh huge storage area in the middle of toronto when it's so costly and it takes up so much land it makes better sense to do something like that maybe more in the outskirts around the peripheral of toronto and just distribute from there as opposed to right in the core of uh well not the core of downtown but the core of toronto where it could have a highest and best use a subway's right nearby you redevelop it you put in about 18 000 i think actually it's around 12 000 units of condominiums and it's almost like a little city in there so you can imagine um that's bigger than say a town of collingwood when you have them fully occupied with people construction differs from manufacturing it's one-time projects it's project-based so project management understanding project management is fundamental to understanding construction and uh you know some of my colleagues don't always agree with me on this you know you gotta really know the specific technical parts i think that with understanding how to run a project any project you've got a lot of transferable skills so even if you take this full program i think if you got into another sector and you get put in charge of projects you've probably got about 50 percent of what you need to know you just got to figure out now the specifics of the technical aspects of whatever that project is you know if it's a it project if it's a manufacturing type project it'll be different than a construction project the technical aspects but the fundamentals of how you run a project there's a lot of them that are very similar it's why one of the designations the global designation pmp project management professional doesn't really distinguish between whether you're a construction person an i.t person a manufacturing person it sticks to the fundamentals and then leaves the detailed technical parts for you to learn and know so problems facing the construction industry highly traditional slow to embrace new technology you have people maybe my age the average age in the construction industry tends to be fairly high i would say in more recent years we've been getting uh younger people into our programs and being very successful entering the construction industry but for years parents were kind of like nervous i don't want my kid going in construction it's a rough and tumble industry but then i think parents started to realize huh all these people that got into i.t a lot of times they get laid off it gets outsourced to another country whereas these construction people seem to have good long steady jobs and they seem to be making very very good money uh maybe not such a bad industry to get into and it they can move around they could go from toronto to vancouver to edmonton it's a very transferable skill as well um so it's highly traditional slow to embrace new technology you got a lot of people in the 50 year plus that are kind of prefer not to use anything more than say email but that's where you've got a huge advantage by the time you finish this program you're in you're going to learn a lot of different programs and you're going to feel pretty adept at just adapting it's not about learning one program it's about just being able to have a growth mindset and say i can figure this out and because you've done it so many other times and developing a toolkit of skills and mental models of how you approach learning a new skill such as different productivity systems restrictive outdated building codes well our regulatory authorities it is getting more and more regulated so it is a quagmire to be sure to work through and that's always a challenge and developers are always screaming that we need to make things more streamlined and easier to do labor agreements lots of union issues so you've got to understand industrial relations liability and legal considerations well yeah you do something wrong it could hurt somebody and it can cause huge financial loss uh lack of profit motive or on their incentives very competitive industry it's sometimes difficult to make people think everybody in running a construction business is making a fortune but sometimes with all the hurdles that we've just been mentioning it can be much more challenging than you might think uh mentioned the regulations and environmental constraints and of course developers have to deal with nimbyism uh which is not in my backyard you know where people don't want a condominium building uh in their backyard in our other uh in the residential course i teach i i explain that when we talk about zoning i go through a personal case that i had myself uh low global uh competition as well we have large construction entities from the us uh now from the uk uh entering canada and competitively bidding on projects that domestic uh contractors that were working on uh doesn't mean for you you could get a job with one of them walsh would be an example that comes to mind turner's another example from the u.s we had carillion until they went bankrupt a number of our students actually got jobs with carilion they actually did very well they moved very quickly on um interesting uh background one of our successful students uh was actually teaching a course with us right now how he's managing his time i don't know but he's running a development company and he's hired a number of employees just to give you a little back back frame of how people think he saw in the news he said to me i saw in the newspaper carilion was going bankrupt and he thought one of my best uh one of the best students that was in my group works at carillion she is a project manager at krillian and i'm going to now that i hear they're going bankrupt i'm going to phone her and see if she wants to come work with me next thing she know you know she's his operations manager so that's how you got to think you know i think a little bit entrepreneurial somebody else is sort of negative could be your positive you could scoop up somebody that's really excellent at what they do and um can make a big difference so those are some of the things that that occur i had them both come in to talk to a class uh last year and um it was nice to see how well that they're growing that business so we already mentioned these so again i won't belabor it you get the idea with uh where these uh are might that picture might be a little bit hidden on you but commercial so bottom picture but as i mentioned these are the types of construction projects you can just imagine just walking around your neighborhood this would be the bridge to prince edward island unless i'm sadly mistaken haven't driven over it a couple of times from new brunswick and we've got lots of different examples of types of construction so with that said we have owners we have public owners we have private owners we have business owners that are project participants right you know a homeowner wants a renovation done uh be a private owner uh yes let's say that we have um uh microsoft wants uh office renovation well that would be a private owner as well if we have the city of toronto want something done that would be a public owner any government type project would be a public owner we have our architect and engineering firms designed firms for our architectural uh design for our structural for our building systems uh for our soils all of those would come under these areas prime contractors considered the contractor that's over the whole project that's the prime contractor sometimes in areas you could have several prime contractors like if you're doing an airport project that maybe it's like two billion dollars they might split up the awarding of the contract into sections of work and so there's no one prime contract they're kind of trying to reduce their risk they don't assign it all to one party in case there's some sort of financial issue or something happens so sometimes that occurs but prime contractors who's over the entire project and then you've got also generally known as the gc you've got the subs and those on a typical project you could have five subcontractors you could have 50 subcontractors uh depends on the complexity of the project and some of those subcontractors could have their own subcontractors suppliers vendors for materials rental equipment new purchases all of those things and then you've got all the regular regulators right building departments banks who may be certifying payments to ensure that work is being done and that you're not billing for things that weren't done insurance companies and then the the array of inspectors inspection systems that come into play so most cases uh when we talk about the key functions you know you just got to look at what are what is their purpose and you can think about the property property owners they want they have some sort of end game right what's the end game that they're after uh it might be university of toronto the end game is to have a new engineering building that they want to have because their old building is at full capacity or their old building is deteriorating and they want to have a new building and decommission the old building it could be for a variety of reasons but what's the end game what are they after and then the design team really has to understand that to ensure that they understand the end game and that they prepare drawing specifications bid documents that reflect what the client is after and the gc has to take that responsibility if they are awarded the project and figure out what's the best way to build this the most efficient way to build this and meet the time cost quality scope requirements and safety requirements to get this structure built so there's those kind of views and of course the trades and specialty subcontractors they do the most of the work so in the area of construction you know the old traditional way would have been a gc itself performs a lot of the work themselves kind of in toronto the gta the gce doesn't perform as much work themselves they subcontract that out it's a very competitive market and traditionally a gc would do on a high rise building the concrete work themselves because that's a big part of that work um today in toronto i would say that's more rare it's it's mostly that they would sub that out to a specialist uh concrete um company um there's all kinds of specialists forming companies and because that's all they do they're better at it and they're more cost effective now you go into smaller markets like edmonton and winnipeg and newfoundland and places like that uh it's not it's it actually is then for those same gcs the specialty market there's not enough work for them uh and so the gcs tend to be better at it so then in those markets they tend to do that work themselves but generally by and large about 90 plus of the work is being done by specialty subcontractors and then of course we've got all of our manufacturers and suppliers that we have to deal with we've got what we call long lead items those are things that take a long time so you've got to order them well in advance you got to plan that you got to schedule that you got to monitor that then you got items you could just order today and get it tomorrow or the next day so what we need to coordinate and how long time frames we have needs to be understood and identified so you got the owner developer you got designers you got the general contractors you've got your allied professionals which we'll we'll bring in uh in a moment those are things like your quantity surveyors your your inspection teams your third party commissioning agents etc gc so a contract is here with the owner developer there's other contracts that are separate so there's no direct contract under a traditional form between the designers and the gc and the gc hires all the subs so gc is taking a lot of risk because they're putting in a price based on what these contractors can do they're gathering all of those prices putting that together and saying to the owner responding to a a bid documents this is what we can do this work for that's the traditional delivery method there is a lot of delivery methods but that's the most popular so it comes under a lump sum and people like to know what's this going to cost uh so as i mentioned earlier the owner can be an individual organization it can be a business george brown college that would be an owner george brown college wants to build a new building so they will typically hire their own project manager as an employee to help them with this process the design professionals so the architects uh and they're looking at all the they have to build they have to design things that fit a budget too so they have to have a reasonable concept of cost or else they're going to design things that when they get the bids in they don't work nothing worse and i've had that where i bid on projects and then the owners shocked and the bud the architect gave them a budget and then it turns out to be way more than that budget amount which can be pretty um frustrating from that perspective right so they have to have a good sense of those areas and prepare the contract and construction documents so they are also acting on the owner's behalf to make sure that the work is being done properly and how it was designed gc i think i've already kind of mentioned the main role of the gc so it's really to coordinate uh to figure out the best methodology to use to contract with the subcontractors and suppliers to procure that work and to make sure that it's done and meets the quality expectations of the contract documents subs those are your specialists your electrical your plumbing your hvac even today though in the big scheme of things there's a lot of the the larger subcontractors they're kind of going through a amalgamation process like your states and your modern niagaras and your guilds they're buying up related uh building systems firms and so they're trying to be like one-stop entities in those areas so they can even coordinate some of that work uh which in some ways makes a lot of sense especially in a market like toronto or canada where you've got certain urban centers that they operate out of where they can be the dominant force if i'm a gc and i can hire one sub that takes care of my plumbing my hvac my electrical makes my life of coordination a lot easier but on the small market they're individuals so in mid-size market they're individuals so don't get me wrong on that um manufacturers and suppliers so you can sort of see the list there brick lumber concrete rental equipments fabricators anything that we want to get pre-assembled and fabricators are becoming more so because with building information modeling 3d models it's easier to design something that that is actually going to work and to build it and ensure that the parameters are correct so that when what comes that's been pre-manufactured actually fits historically that didn't work that way and if we got too many things pre-manufactured we'd find they don't work because there was something wrong with the design so we're able to better vet the design using bim modeling so that increases the opportunity to pre-fabricate more if you pre-provocate more off-site you have less waste and higher quality control opportunities we'll talk about and governments and we'll be getting into the different regulatory authorities in in ontario it's the ontario building code that gets enforced and it's the actual municipalities and cities and towns that actually do the uh enforcements as you'll find out from your other courses allied professionals so these are all these ones that i was mentioning like quantity surveyors bond uh brokers inspection firms like testing and commissioning areas etc types of construction uh works i that's the other thing too again some companies they practically do everything you know i would say pcl alice dawn they pretty much do everything except low-rise housing i haven't seen them do that but most other things there's they probably have done it one shape way shape or form there's certain things they specialize in more than others but over the last 15 years they've all started to get into the heavy civil up to that point they were separate companies but over the last 15 to 20 years most of these larger companies have also absorbed those sectors of the market i think they realized and i think it's a good uh position uh if you think about a construction business it is a cyclical business so if i only build condominiums i'm in a pretty tight spot when the condominium market goes down or if i only build schools i'm in a pretty tight spot if the government's cutting back and there's no school projects coming out right but on the other hand if i build condominiums and i build skills and i build highways and roads and bridges well if the market goes if the economy goes south very often more times than not the government invests a lot of money in infrastructure so while my condo market and while my institutional market might go south i've got lots of opportunities in the heavy civil uh areas so it's kind of like looking at well do i have something that is diversifying my portfolio of projects so that i'm not leaving myself overly exposed that's one concept another concept is you can't be the best at everything so pick something and just choose that and roll with it and make sure that you're not overexposed so when it's a downtime you can just back off so there's different viewpoints when we talk about construction businesses and how they're organized and how they operate it's really worth thinking about that even when you think about a career you know how exposed am i in this particular sector have i got skill sets that i could quickly move laterally to a different sector uh and protecting yourself that way or at least thinking strategically so that you can do different tactics depending on what's going on so i'll just flip through these because i think that oh and so some companies they'll they'll operate they'll prefer gc sort of frameworks they bid on lump sum projects others just want to be construction managers not at risk meaning they work for they get hired by owners and they'll make sure the projects are constructed but they're not contracting directly with the subcontractors so there's less risk there's less reward because you just get a percentage over the top but there's less risk a lot of the big gcs um and i say gcs or liberally but construction companies would be a better word under these terms um we'll do all of these all right or at least three of the four trade contractors they specialize in one area i'll let you read through those rather than going through and i think that kind of spells out what i wanted to cover in this particular section is just understanding the different parties and how they come together and some of the opportunities again i'm really excited about the construction industry i think that there's so many opportunities and there's no one way of doing things there's a lot of ways of doing things wrong but there's also a lot of ways of doing things right and there's also ways that we haven't even figured out yet of doing things even more right if you want so uh it's an exciting industry but you got to know the fundamental basis and then you're going to be building all these little neural networks in your brain about all these little things and right now for some of you this is like a piece of cake and for others use it's overwhelming and so everybody's going to reach an equilibrium at a certain point in the program where the neural networks and all these little points and they're just going to start firing and connecting with each other and then it's going to come together and then you're going to start to see it and you're in a very good position right now at the beginning of your degree program to see how this is playing out and to be diligent about it and go at this watch these videos participate in the lectures you know i i get students oh i didn't miss anything in that one class yeah maybe that one class that you missed is not a big deal maybe that one video that you didn't watch is not a big deal but it's cumulative and over a period of uh four years if you miss enough stuff you've got all these knowledge gaps even more than a regular graduate and the construction industry it's not a forgiving industry it has high expectations and it doesn't matter if you have a diploma a degree you got the job they'll very quickly let you go if they see that you can't pick things up quickly they don't expect you to know everything when you start but they expect you to be very adaptable and agile and quickly pick things up and these are skills that you will learn through the different courses here and over time you'll have that developed that'll be in your your tool kit and you can very easily adapt and that's where i've seen successful the most successful students uh over my career um really really excel and adapt like that student i was mentioning miles cope really successful but i remember him when he was in the class you you know he was kept asking questions kept wanting more information would pick every professor's brain to get ever whatever it is that he was thinking about in those time periods don't waste your time take advantage of it use some of the tips that we talked about in lecture 1 8 for to better focus and increase your ability to learn more efficiently so that you can get more stuff in a shorter period of time and still enjoy your life okay so that's tom stevenson signing off for today and we will see you soon bye for now