Industrial Training International — Q&A with President & CEO
One of the many challenges facing the construction industry — perhaps the biggest one— is the looming labor crunch. Training has always been an essential part of the industry, but the urgency takes an even larger role in the current environment.
Industrial Training International (ITI) is a global leader in the design and delivery of learning solutions for organizations conducting crane, rigging, and load handling activities. Founded in 1986, ITI has grown to produce live, online, and on-demand courses delivered via the ITI Learning Hub.
Zack Parnell has been at the helm as it’s been recognized with numerous industry association awards for its groundbreaking virtual reality (VR) crane simulator solutions.
Give us a sense of your direction for ITI, especially in the context of a well-documented labor shortage in the construction industry.
I love what we do at ITI. Our industry is similar to the world of academia in that it is very fragmented and there are specialists in various content disciplines. At ITI, we are a trusted advisor to heavy industrial sites and construction companies pertaining to risk with lifting and mobile equipment. The risk ranks highly because it involves a variety of crafts, equipment, and phases of work.
The worker shortage is well-documented and there’s no silver bullet. In the industrial plant environment, we are seeing job descriptions and task lists that are growing — equating to fewer people and much more cross-training. The training that’s necessary to fulfill this need can be accomplished, but it’s difficult in the construction industry for a number of reasons.
A core challenge facing our customers is keeping their employees engaged during the learning experience as well as vigilant while on the job. We are working hard at creating incredible learning experiences in person, online, and in simulation that engages minds and hands.
We aim to create truly fun learning experiences that train and assess people. E-learning has a negative connotation these days and so we’re working hard to create engaging web-based and VR experiences.
To do that, we rely on really good instructional designers and graphic artists, 3D artists, even Unity developers and game designers. So, yeah, it’s a really fun group to work with.
What type of content is being built for construction? Can you talk a bit about those game scenarios?
Some recent content being built involves a construction hazard awareness exam. We’ve built a ten acre construction site that’s set in a virtual environment. It’s a lot of land to cover so it has buildings and ditches and mobile equipment and lifting activities — all sorts of things.
The game mechanics for that exam is to identify hazards, like doing a job site inspection. Another exam is having the user go around a virtual fabrication facility and inspect and troubleshoot electrical and mechanical issues on an overhead crane.
What’s great about both of those is that you can do them with a VR headset, but Unity also has WebGL technology where we can output to a browser as well. So we can put that in a job site trailer and people really appreciate the accessibility of it.
What challenges are on the horizon for workforce training and how are you addressing them?
Social distancing and travel restrictions have really set training back in some ways. Remote expert and digital learning has increased, but in general, COVID-19 has definitely been a hurdle to learning and development of people — not everyone learns and you can’t learn everything through digital learning solutions.
That said, VR adoption is ramping up. We’re helping companies make sense of VR hardware, content management systems, and what learning assignments make the most sense. There are still many companies, both big and small, that are increasing their use of e-learning and deploying e-learning assignments to employees.
The construction industry has put together a very project manage-y way of ensuring milestones are met that involves gatekeepers in training. But you see where the technology trends are headed and technology platforms are taking the wind out of the sails of these traditional gatekeeper.
An interesting thing we’re seeing is large construction companies applying a digital transformation approach to learning and development parts of their business. We have a handful of customers that have a mandate to go from 10 percent digital learning, asynchronous digital learning, to 50 percent by 2025. That equates to a lot of knowledge capture, training needs assessments, and so on.
These companies are seeing that e-learning creates incredible cost savings, not just on the delivery of learning, but also on the ability for people in construction to consume content at any given moment in time versus live training — and I think that the outcomes of that will be that it makes live training more meaningful and impactful too.
That said, there’s still a lot of the industry that needs to adopt general e-learning solutions, let alone VR, and so we’re helping there as well.
In the age of YouTube and LinkedIn, it feels like knowledge-sharing is being increasingly democratized. How do you see the certification process changing in light of these new platforms?
I am a huge YouTube user — I subscribe to YouTube Red to get rid of ads. User generated content on YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia and so on makes the internet so valuable. In the world of risk management, training and safety, these sources can be incredibly valuable, but they must be vetted and curated.
ITI has embedded YouTube videos and other freely available content, such as thought-leading engineering channels and original equipment manufacturers, in our customer Learning Paths.
The learning space is so interesting right now, and it’s undergoing so much change. Peter Thiel has been warning of the great education bubble for a long time now — and it’s here. Harvard predicts that half of colleges will be closed by 2030. Google just announced 6-month Professional Certificates that will be accepted in lieu of a college degree.
We trust our government, ANSI/ANAB, certification bodies, and other organizations to tell us the job-task analysis: What does someone need to know and do? What is the right way to assess and certify them?
In construction, we need to ensure people have the skills and knowledge to succeed safely. I think more and more, certification programs will be more about demonstrating knowledge and skill, and less about completing a course.
I still trust my state and hospital to set the training, certification, and experience standards for my doctor or surgeon. That happens in industrial skills certification and training too — although sometimes things don’t evolve as fast as we’d like.
What are some steps you’re taking to maybe accelerate things?
To quote Thiel again, he argues that a new solution must be a 10X improvement on the alternative to really have a revolution of sorts (to change behavior) — or 1/10th the cost.
We’re evolving the certification process. For instance, we are currently in the process of securing ANSI accreditation for our Virtual Reality experience — Construction Hazard Awareness.
This is a development that is truly a first of its kind. Developed with the participation of the National Safety Council (NSC), Bechtel, DPR Construction, GLY Construction, Kiewit, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and United Rentals, the VR Construction Hazard Awareness experience challenges candidates to inspect a jobsite and identify several risk domains including hand tools, lock out/tag out, lifting and rigging, dropped objects, and more.
We announced the Hazard Awareness Certification with the National Safety Council at NSC Congress & Expo in October. Applicants who successfully complete the exam with a passing score are awarded a five-year Construction Hazard Awareness certification.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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