Industry initiative: a new training approach for the water infrastructure sector

For the first time, companies involved in planning and constructing water infrastructure – including manufacturers, construction firms and engineering service providers – are pooling their practical expertise to develop a joint training approach for the industry. The aim is to counter the growing shortage of skilled workers and the loss of experiential knowledge in critical infrastructure sectors.

This initiative is a response to a development that is creating growing challenges for many stakeholders: projects in water and wastewater infrastructure are becoming increasingly complex – driven by stricter regulatory requirements, rising investment needs and the impacts of climate change. At the same time, experienced professionals are retiring while too few qualified young talents are entering the field. As a result, decisions in planning, construction and operation must increasingly be made under uncertainty and time pressure – with consequences that often last for decades.

“In many projects, the kind of expertise that used to grow within teams over many years is simply no longer available,” explains Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stein, initiator of the industry initiative. “Especially when it comes to holistic assessments, for example in the rehabilitation or operation of networks, it becomes clear how valuable experience-based knowledge is for well-founded decisions.”

Against this backdrop, companies from different areas of the water infrastructure sector – including players from planning and construction – have joined forces to systematically bundle their knowledge and make it available at any time. The result is the new platform PIPEWISE, which will be presented for the first time in May at IFAT, the world’s leading trade fair and key industry event for water and environmental technologies.

PIPEWISE is designed as a digital training platform tailored to the practical requirements of day-to-day project work. It focuses on construction and rehabilitation methods, process engineering and their practical application. These process applications are visualised and didactically prepared in detail based on real construction and rehabilitation projects.

This gives users the opportunity to understand construction and rehabilitation methods at a level of detail that is often not accessible even to site managers in real-world project environments. In this way, PIPEWISE creates a unique gateway to process-related, experience-based and application-oriented knowledge.

The content is based on practical experience and brings together different perspectives. The result is a shared knowledge space that goes far beyond individual organisations and integrates multiple viewpoints along the value chain. “Our goal is to provide practice-relevant knowledge exactly where it is needed – in the specific project context,” says Stein. “This is how we contribute to making decisions in water infrastructure more robust and transparent.”

The platform is scheduled to launch in autumn. Pre-registration for an automatic email notification at launch, as well as for early-bird offers, is already available.

Further information: www.pipewise.de