Technical Skills in Quantity Surveying and Relevant Practices: Discipline Standards

Abstract

Technical skills in Quantity Surveying (QS) is an essential knowledge. The knowledge is necessary for a quantity surveyor to perform the quantification task with the relevant discipline standards. Without good technical skills, quantity surveyor professionals may feel imperfect on what they are doing and subsequently causing low quality of work. Therefore, from this study, some key warnings on the relevant factors that influence the quantity surveying students' technical skills and knowledge for employment in the industry were further discussed. This research was conducted among the quantity surveying professionals in Malaysian construction companies (northern region of Malaysia). The acquired data were analysed by using SPSS software. The results showed that, for the purpose of solving and improving the technical skills among Quantity Surveyor, most of the professionals tend to agree that it is important to reach the optimal discipline standards. Examples of factors and personal elements that contribute to the technical skills in Quantity Surveying and relevant practices are issues concerning two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) representations, construction quantification difficulties, standard terminology and construction components, quality of construction drawings details, introduction to current practices, construction experiences and current information technology or software intervention. Additionally, the potential solutions have been stressed to promote the most effective learning methodologies that could support the learning and performance framework studies of the Quantity Surveying fields and the relevant quality standards.