BIM Fundamentals and buildingSMART professional certification: presentation session

This recording captures a live webinar, held in April 2021, in which the BIM Fundamentals course was presented and buildingSMART's professional certification was explained. The first part places the organisation: an international not-for-profit body that promotes working in BIM through open, neutral standards, what is known as Open BIM, structured into three programmes — Standards, Compliance and User — with local chapters and a user community at national level. It then describes how the certification was structured at that time: at the base, a knowledge certification, purely theoretical, assessed by a multiple-choice examination; above it, a specialist level intended to evidence experience, which at that point was presented as still under development. The speaker stresses that it is individual, aimed at people and not at companies, and that the fundamentals programme was purely theoretical. The session then reviews the programme's content, in three blocks. The first answers what BIM is and what Open BIM is: the principles of technology, people and processes; the confusion between Modeling, Model and Management; BIM dimensions and uses; and open workflows supported by standards such as IFC and BCF. The second focuses on protocols and standards, with ISO 19650 at its core: what an ISO is and why it is needed, terminology such as AIM, PIM, LOD and LOIN, information requirements, the BIM execution plan and the common data environment. The third takes it into practical territory with roles and responsibilities — BIM manager, coordinator, modeller, author — and with the risks worth weighing before planning a BIM implementation in a company. The final stretch is a question round with attendees. There it is clarified that the course was not oriented to any software and was valid when working with any tool, that the certification was optional for anyone who only wanted the content, and that the BIM methodology serves new build as much as renovation and infrastructure, across the whole life cycle. It closes with a plain explanation of what it means to work with virtual information models as against traditional work with fragmented information. What is described corresponds to what was explained on the date of the recording and does not reflect any current training offering; the commercial terms and enrolment dates cited in the seminar have been omitted as they are out of date.