BIM training in construction management educational practices in Croatia and Slovakia

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an intelligent 3D model-based process that enhances productivity and management performance of construction projects. For its successful adaptation, education and standardization are one of the prerequisites and key success factors. Even though some countries in the European Union have started to mandate the usage of BIM on all public projects and have developed standards to support such implementation, Croatia and Slovakia have done little to support such initiatives. Furthermore, to support BIM usage, universities need to update their curricula accordingly and thus enable construction engineers the knowledge and skills. This would lead to new BIM competencies. In order to understand the current status quo of the BIM education provided in Croatia and Slovakia, map the reasons of scarce BIM initiatives and propose guidelines for improvements, we surveyed and compared two representative civil engineering faculties which are Faculty of Civil Engineering Košice and Faculty of Civil Engineering Zagreb. The survey investigated Construction Management program on master study and assessed achievement of each BIM learning outcomes. The results show that very little has been done in integration of different knowledge areas towards open BIM approach. This is especially evident in the knowledge areas such as coordination, interoperability and clash detection. Hence, some rare courses which include BIM are being taught independently of each other and could be set to BIM level 1 maturity level. At the end of the paper we provide guidelines for improvement of undergraduate and graduate studies. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Diamond Congress Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2018.