December 17, 2004—In October, i-FM invited senior representatives of the UK’s leading facilities management organizations to join in a review of the current state of FM and to try to reach some agreement on what needs to be done to support development of the industry.
Taking the two key research studies, Rethinking Facilities Management and An Audit of the UK FM Market Sector, as its starting point, the roundtable discussion ranged across the spectrum of issues.
A large part of the discussion focused on people—who becomes a facilities manager and how? Is there enough support available for career development? Should we be doing more to foster the growth and evolution of the profession and the industry?
Grappling with questions like those led to general agreement that recruitment and training issues need to be addressed actively at all levels in FM. As BIFM CEO Ian Fielder observed: “It’s a bit of a cop-out that we say “it’s a young profession and therefore we don’t have to do anything because it will all grow”. It won’t grow unless we structure it. Unless we put in the foundations and the frameworks now, we could always just say ‘it’s a young profession’ and therefore we’ve got to wait for things to grow.”
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Reprinted with permission; copyright 2004 i-FM
