Making the best of time.

With things not as busy as they were , it has allowed me look at various methods of presentation and hopefully develop new skills. .. maybe I might now have time to learn revit or even complete that POP record which will allow me apply for CIAT Chartered-ship. In the last few weeks I've been doing some work with AutoDesk's Impression 2. In the past I've use the original version for one or two things, but not to the extent of recent weeks. Its great for presentations as it allows dwg drawings to be transformed into what looks like a hand sketches. And whats better is you can update the cad drawing and with a clip of a button the impression file updates as well... so all the work done is not lost. I have found a few bugs, with times not updating properly, but its still faster than redoing a hand sketch. The smaller fills seem to export better to pdf and jpeg for printing and distribution. So far with the larger files i've found the best results by printing through the software itself. I recently competed a set of plans which looked like a traditional set of blueprints (in blue and all).

Its all about upskilling now.

The downturn

The last few weeks has seen a major sudden down turn resulting in a significant rationalisation plan been put in place in work. Unfortunately most of the staff have received their notice, as work has pretty much dried up and little prospect of anything like the volume of work we had. Getting in fees for work done isn't helping either, as clients are slow to come up with the money. We're not the only one's in the same boat: speaking with many fellow technologists the trend is common, throughout the country. The construction industry as a whole is taking a big hit.

Despite the downturn, my work of late has been varied from doing feasibility studies, planning applications for warehousing and even the odd fire cert application... something I haven't done in about 6 years.

Where will it end, I don't quiet know, however one thing is we need to be positive and look to the challenges of the future and not the good times of the past.