Episode #71: Going DIGITAL: Amy Vilis, DIGITAL, and John Reid, Faber Technologies

It sounds like it could smooth over a lot of the problems with, as you say, people coming, immigrants coming in and, you know, they have skills and they have certifications possibly in their own country, but they have difficulty getting that recognized here.

Is that something we're seeing as a problem?

Yeah, I think we're, you know, we're holistically not seeing that yet.

Just based on looking at the data, right? I think there's a lot of Canadians that live in Canada that are looking to get into the sector that maybe don't have any skills and that want to get skilled up.

And I think that's a really great way to start, obviously.

And then obviously kind of going down that road if we get there.

But yeah, I think that the big issue that's facing the industry right now is this skill shortage.

There's not enough skilled workers that are out in the field.

You know, a lot of companies don't have the time necessarily to be able to upskill all these people all at once, right? They have to get these projects done as fast and seemingly possible.

So I think creating a platform where workers can actually learn at their own pace is so important.

And that's what we've created today.

Right, right.

That's easy to see how that would help.

Amy, talk to me a little bit about the goals and the broad mission of the HDI.

How do you see your efforts leading to more building?

Yeah, so it's the origin, the complexity of the sector, as you know, is so vast.

And it has traditionally been a sector that has underspent in research and development dollars.

So normally, you know, I'd say we see 1% versus in healthcare, you're plus 13% of dollars going into R&D.

So we've done that for years.

The constraints within our environment, the deficit that we have in housing, So we've traditionally put the cost of R&D on project values.

So you're building something for someone, you try something different, that goes into the cost of the build.

So it affects affordability.

So we've been really focused at looking at a very mission-driven innovation program where we're looking, okay, what's our big goal? And our goal is constituents in every community should be able to build the homes they need.

So how do we modernize the whole system? So taking a system approach and understanding that if you affect change in one element of the end-to-end housing production, where are the upstream and downstream values that you can clasp onto and bolt on another technology that's going to help impact the next phase? So as opposed to looking at things in silos and trying to affect change in one granular area, we've taken the approach of looking at the whole system and created an end-to-end understanding of what housing production looks like in a phased approach.

And then it's all about deploying and validating what modern methods of construction can be incorporated within that.