A few years ago Ron Palma of Vancouver Community College took his students on a field trip to the new Amazon facility in downtown Vancouver, B.C., being built on top of a former industrial building. They weren’t there to discuss tech jobs or even economic development, but instead the nuts and bolts of construction. That’s in a literal sense.
As a steel construction modeling technician instructor, Palma heads VCC’s steel detailing program. “We tend to get tunnel vision, a worker in front of a monitor, and we forget how big a scale we’re working on. It’s an eye-opening experience seeing large steel structures and pieces of steel being welded and bolted together.”
VCC recently renamed its certificate program to “steel construction modeling,” a move that shows just how little people outside the construction trade know about steel detailing. “They think it’s about washing cars,” Palma said. “So we changed the name to steel construction modeling to better reflect what we’re doing.”
Palma emphasized that he wasn’t pointing blame at the broader public. Their misunderstanding points to a communication problem that plagues various aspects of the structural metal fabrication trades and, for that matter, metalworking overall.
“There is a severe shortage of steel detailers right now,” Palma said, adding that this shortage has driven enrollment in VCC’s certificate program. Since the pandemic, in fact, the school has offered remote learning opportunities for aspiring steel detailers from all over the world. “We’ve had students from South Korea, Hong Kong, and from other parts of Canada.”
The steel detailer shortage has far-reaching implications, considering the steel detailer’s role in the construction supply chain. Steel detailers might work at a structural fabricator, be a subcontractor to one, or contract directly with the general contractor. Whoever employs them, detailers work at the intersection of information flow, marrying construction standards with best fabrication practices and best sequencing for erection. They go through drawings with a fine-toothed comb (hence the term detailing) to ensure compliance with various industry standards. Without good detailing, structural fabrication falls apart, figuratively and (even worse) literally.
Palma takes his detailing students on construction site and fabricator visits for a reason: They can’t learn the entire trade only by working with software, though software has become more critical than ever. They need to see the big picture. After all, the mouse clicks they make can affect how fabricators or erectors perform their work.
