Concrete Association picks up

The Concrete Association is certainly not sitting still. A professional organization is working hard to ensure that the training and courses in corona time will continue in a modified form, the board has been brought up to full strength in size and composition and the digital dissemination of knowledge in the form of Studio Beton Digitaal has started energetically.

The Concrete Association, founded in 1927, is a knowledge network with corporate, personal and student members and is an important binding factor for the entire industry. The association provides training and courses for an average of 900 people annually and organizes seminars and conferences for members and interested parties. "Gaining knowledge, sharing knowledge and making knowledge is our motto," states director Maikel Jagroep. "To give shape to that in the new corona reality was quite a switch. Especially when you consider that most classes are classroom-based or take place in a laboratory environment."

Online

The past few months have therefore been spent working hard to facilitate working from home, converting offline to online classes, setting up a complete platform for this form of teaching and facilitating over eighty teachers in teaching virtual classes. Jagroep: "Most are used to being in front of the class half or full days, now the lessons are cut up and made virtual. That changeover does require something of our teachers and students. Now that the first relaxations are a fact, we can pick up a series of classes again physically but in smaller groups. We also see advantages for teachers and students in mixing digital and physical teaching. If you ask everyone involved, you automatically arrive at optimal solutions. For the time being we have had to postpone laboratory-related lessons to the fall. In any case, interest is undiminished. For our new Basic Knowledge of Concrete General course we had more than a hundred applicants who are taking the exam as we speak. A success number to which we receive very positive reactions. You can see from that that the need for knowledge about concrete is great."

Concrete Day

The Concrete Association has yet to decide on the continuation of two other successes, the Concrete Experience and Concrete Day on November 18 and 19, 2020. Jagroep: "These are major events with, respectively, a thousand students from secondary and higher education and two thousand professionals on our Concrete Day. A lot of time and energy goes into the preparation and elaboration, and if you see, for example, in a country like the United States how quickly a situation can change, you can hardly predict how things will go in the Netherlands. We will decide in the coming weeks if and how we will set up the events and make that known through all our channels."

Chairman Dorien Staal: "We have a wealth of knowledge in house. to move forward, you have to pool that knowledge, then you can innovate faster." (Photo" Daniëlle Verweij)

Support

Since May 2020, the Concrete Association has five new board members and again a full board with representation from the entire (concrete) construction sector. The association thus again has a good sounding board to practice and support in the sector. Dorien Staal, general manager of Voorbij Prefab, has been a board member since May last year and chairman since December. "Because of the changes, the whole value chain is now involved. We have representatives from an engineering firm, a contractor, an architect, a client, manufacturers and from higher education. For example, if you want to take up a topic like circularity as a sector, you will also have to do it with the architect and the client. We obviously find the connection with education very important to have a good connection with our own offerings. That is why I am very pleased with the entry of Thomas Beuker on behalf of the colleges."

Studio Concrete Digital

A good example of the fruitful collaboration between a decisive agency and a professional board is the recent launch of Studio Beton Digitaal, in collaboration with the Concrete House. Staal: "For this, we developed a series of webinars, extremely professionally designed, on current topics that can be followed on Friday mornings. The first one was on June 26 and was about the tension between circular design and CO2 reduction and was followed by more than 150 participants. You can see then that hardly anyone dropped out of this DWDD for concrete, so this was a successful start. After the construction period we will pick up the thread with the use of wood and concrete, circularity and alternative binders. You notice that there is an enormous need in the market for knowledge sharing, partly because of the Concrete Agreement. The association is then pre-eminently the stage to join forces and be able to make the sustainability transition, for example."

Pooling knowledge

Jagroep: "Then you notice that having a full board with professional people from the entire field of work reflects on the Concrete Association. Especially if you want to organize knowledge exchange for the entire sector in the best possible way." Steel concludes, "We have a wealth of knowledge in house. To move forward, you have to pool that knowledge, then you can innovate faster. It is the task of the Concrete Association to facilitate this, to indicate where the knowledge is and to set up the knowledge network. Maikel and his team do this professionally. Even in times of corona."    

For current information on the Concrete Association, Concrete Day and Concrete Experience see www.betonvereniging.nl.