Making information management education fit-for-purpose

How have we reached the point where you can spend over a decade learning and preparing to do a job, and then, on day one in the job, you are enrolled on a course to learn vital skills? Yet, this is a common experience for many graduates entering the construction industry for the first time. I hear the other side of this discussion when talking to university academics: that curricula are already full and there is no room to explore detailed technologies and processes which come and go with fashions; they must stick to teaching principles and approaches.

In my own apprentice experience back in the 1990s, I learned about information management (IM) by repeatedly completing the same basic processes until it became second nature. As my career progressed, many of these manual processes were automated, but I was able to validate the deliverables because I understood the underlying principles. Today we are facing an unprecedented skills shortage, and it can be tempting to think that AI will fill those gaps by circumventing processes such as IM.

We are told that junior roles will be disbanded, and that a few senior people will oversee the output of AI. But where do these senior people come from, if not through the ranks who learned the manual processes? Is academia creating graduates for roles that no longer have a future? How do we accommodate this ground-shift of industry requirement? If we start to design a new curriculum today, it will be six or seven years at least before a graduate comes out of the other end, so how do we design new curricula to accommodate what AI will be capable of seven years from now, when we don’t know what it will be capable of in seven weeks?

I want us to look holistically at the whole education system from schools, colleges, universities, and onto commercial practice. How can we support learners throughout the whole journey in a way which builds and supports each step? The current siloed approach leads to three steps forward, two steps back, and then two more steps to the side. We should be creating pathways for learners with consistent objectives and milestones and looking at ways to support the education supply chain.

Academic forum

To help kickstart a broader approch to IM upskilling and education, I have been working with leadng academics in the field to relaunch a group focused on information management in the built and managed environment (see April 2026 news). Formerly the ‘BIM Academic forum’, the refreshed group aims to build clear educational pathways for learners at every stage in their careers. It’s about connecting providers, empowering learners, and advancing the field.

Updating our IM Learning Outcomes

In parallel to the forum, another workstream has been launched this year, to rework the ‘Learning Outcomes Framework’. Originally developed in 2012 and updated in 2020, the LOF was designed to help both those providing and receiving training to understand what topics need to be taught. With the planned revisions to the ISO 19650 series of standards, this resource is as important as ever. The latest revision takes a much more granular approach to defining learning outcomes, by creating a detailed master list of IM responsibilities, and analysing the personas which need to be aware of or responsible for each of those tasks.

The new framework will require input from experts across every industry perspective as we develop the first iteration of an all-encompassing approach to tailored upskilling. The plan is to divide the work into five distinct pillars of activity:

• Standards identification and review
• Persona development
• Storytelling
• Data science
• Delivery model

To help make this happen, we need people prepared to undertake research; we need expert panels; and we need people to review our document outputs. With committed resources, I think 2026 will be a key turning point in IM upskilling and education. It is needed now – more than ever before.