Interview with Richard Hodgett, Engineering Director at Built: How Built Adopted TeleTraining Technical Courses

Built identified that we had some technical competency deficiencies within our engineering cohort due to a range of reasons. We had a look at the market to determine which providers were available and what the maturity of the content was, how well presented it was, and the extent of that content.

We pretty quickly realized that TeleTraining was a standout in the market. The content of the modules, the way they presented, the different styles of presentation—really effective, keeps the interest of the participants high, and really helped us fill those technical gaps that we were seeking to take care of.

We’re in the second-year development of the program. Actually, we ran a pilot program in 2024. At that time, we picked up our core engineering cohort, which was our site engineers, project, senior project engineers, and our services engineers. It was a really successful pilot of around 50 people.

This year, we’ve expanded that to almost 100 people. We’ve picked up our sustainability and digital engineers as well as our quality coordinators and quality engineers. We’ve also expanded it from New South Wales to be a national program. So, we’ve extended it to Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and WA. That cohort also has picked up our small works and fit-out divisions as well.

Richard Hodgett: A key part of any program is understanding the effectiveness as you progress. So we send out pulse surveys, which are short surveys undertaken progressively through the program, as we did in the pilot. We also did a pretty comprehensive survey at the end of the pilot program, asking what the benefits were and how each participant saw it as an effective tool for them in their professional development.

The response from those surveys was overwhelmingly positive. From there, it was a no-brainer to roll it out to a 2025 program in New South Wales, and the business made the decision to roll it out nationally as well.

It’s really critical to have the HR and Learning Development team involved in the setting up of the program. Setting up learning paths for a cohort helps us take each individual of that cohort—while we have a group of sort of upwards of 90 now, each individual is looked at: What is the best learning path for them? What’s the best development for them?

That’s not something that me as an engineering director is able to do on my own. The specialists who are in HR and learning development teams really help us piece that together properly. And what’s resulted is a program that’s really well structured. Everybody has taken a lot out of it, and the feedback we’ve had is excellent today.

The key metric that we’ve taken away is the increasing confidence with each individual’s technical capability, the confidence they take to site each day, dealing with consultants, dealing with specialist subcontractors.

There was also the online quizzes that were part of each of the modules—before and after outcomes of those quizzes—and there was quite a marked increase in the competencies of the individuals. So, you know, I’ve got some metrics in front of me; we’re looking at in the order of 30% increase of positive outcomes in terms of answering questions within the quiz.

So just that base level of technical understanding was raised by quite a high degree, just by doing the online modules. That, coupled with the rest of the program—practical application, you know, taking things to site and seeing them in practice—made it a hugely successful program.