Jessica Seddon
CAD / REVIT Technician
Time at CWC:
3 years, 10 months
Was engineering presented to you as career option in school / college?
In all honesty, it wasn’t. It was something I looked into myself along with other similar roles such as architecture. In high school student were also pushed strongly towards university, with apprenticeships and work-based learning routes really downplayed. They unfortunately had a reputation of being only for ‘naughty’ or ‘less intelligent’ students, which is completely incorrect!
I imagine things have improved since 2012 when I left school. I really think that if we want to bring more women into the industry that’s where it starts. At that age when students are thinking about their careers, we need to help then identify the best way to get there.
How have you developed in your current role?
For the past two years I’ve been steadily managing the CAD/RVT/BIM workload within our Liverpool office. I am progressing away from the standard expectations of my role as a technician and more into a lead/management role, which I have been enjoying a lot.
For me it has felt like the natural progression of my career path. I enjoy the challenge and balancing the changing workload. I want to help develop and improve processes and understanding, for myself and the business as a whole. I am passionate about what I do, and I want that passion to translate into the quality of end product CWC puts out there.
What role do you think digital engineering will play in the future of the construction industry?
I really think that Revit and the process of BIM is still being underutilized industry wide. The potential is there for truly collaborative design and I hope to see everyone across the construction industry invest a lot more resources into understanding it.
I feel in our industry that communication can be lacking between different parties involved in a project, and that slows things down. This is where I think Revit and the 3D Collaborative design process can be utilized to its fullest. I’d like to see more projects using cloud based services such as BIM360, where all disciplines feed their model information into one central file.
This level of collaboration does pose its own unique challenges, and it is very different from the standard information releases used across the industry at present. But it has so many advantages, and if used correctly it helps the 3D modelling process to aid pre-emptive design, helping to eliminate problems that could arise in the construction phase early on.
To me, this is what Revit should be used for. It’s a fantastic bit of software that is so much more than just 3D coordination and making nice looking renders for presentations.