AN environmentally conscious surveying practice is putting sustainability at the heart of its service provision with the creation of a new, bespoke internal training course.
Trident Building Consultancy has joined forces with the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) to create a unique course which is aimed at upskilling every building surveyor and project manager working in the business.
The move bucks the industry trend of having a specialist sustainability individual or small team within a practice that provide advice and input into specific projects.
By providing the training across the whole of the business, Trident is ensuring sustainability and reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions is at the forefront of every survey and project it undertakes, helping clients to minimise their impact on the environment.
Managing director Dan Roe said the initiative came about because sustainability is the highest topic on everyone’s agenda, particularly clients.
The first cohort, comprising of Trident’s senior leaders, has already got started on the programme, with the business aiming to roll out further training to the remainder of Trident’s surveyors over the next year.
Mr Roe said: “Many surveying practices and building consultancies have gone down the route of recruiting a small number of in-house staff or small teams that specialise in sustainability.
“Whereas we would never rule that out, we want to go beyond that and upskill all of our existing client-facing workforce. We already have a good knowledge and experience of sustainability such as energy performance and how to make buildings more efficient, but we want to turn that into a much wider knowledge so we can advise our clients more comprehensively.
“We’re trying to embed sustainability in everything thing we do. A building surveyor’s mindset was traditionally always to fix buildings, but we now want our surveyors not just to be looking at how we repair buildings but how we make them more energy efficient, too. It is a bit of a mindset change and the training programme we’ve developed is designed to facilitate that.”
The training course has been developed in partnership with UKGBC, a membership organisation established to transform the sustainability of the built environment.
It comprises of online and classroom-based training delivered by experts from the UKGBC, covering topics such as ESG and the built environment, decarbonising buildings, and how net zero strategies can be integrated into commercial retrofits.
Mr Roe said it was fantastic to be working with the UKGBC which he described as ‘a leading authority on making buildings more sustainable’.
“They have more than 700 members who are all extremely passionate about the subject,” he said.
“They lobby government on policy and are at the coalface of developing sustainable solutions that enable people and nature to thrive side-by-side.
“Partnering with them for this training means we’re in great hands.” Trident Building Consultancy has nine offices across the UK and Ireland, including Birmingham, Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, and Manchester.
Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
