Have you ever wondered why in India we do not have a Manhattan like business district or beautiful streetscapes of Amsterdam or landmarks like Sydney Harbour Bridge or Urban Squares of Rome or Multimodal transit hubs like Frankfurt?

The reason for this is that we never aspired for the creation of such landmarks. But, thankfully we have unveiled one landmark as Statue of Unity that shows our aspiration and execution capability towards creation of world class landmarks. We now mean business about our built environment where outdoor experience development is gaining focus.

This expected spending opens great opportunity for built environment professionals who can work with modern technology and financing mechanisms.

Challenges and opportunities of the industry:

So far we have been too focused in meeting our basic needs from built environment as well as its financing.

After building Chandigarh, the beautiful city, our entire focus had been to deal with short term problems of urban development i.e. housing, transport, slums and basic infrastructure.

Initially government was providing all of it but post mid 90's focus for delivery turned to private sector.

But we still do not have an entire city that can rub shoulders with western world cities in quality of tourist experience, infrastructure, and accessibility for differently abled people, children and senior citizens, safety and security. We have miles to go before we can rest, in creation of suitable and sustainable built environment which is a happy place to live, work and play.

One of the key challenges that we are lagging in creation of beautiful built environment, is acute shortage of built environment professionals.

It is an easy decision for students to make that built environment sector courses (i.e. real estate, property valuations, sales and marketing, facilities management, construction project management, urban studies etc) offer a promising long-term career.

Career choices within built environment sector:

• Real estate
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  Finance and capital markets
• 
  Sales and marketing
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  Consulting and valuation
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  Facilities management
• 
  Real estate transactions
• 
  Tech start-ups
• 
  Construction industry
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  Construction project management
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  Quantity surveying
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  Building construction
• 
  Building information modelling
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  Building services management
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  Consulting services
• 
  Urban infrastructure.

Real estate and construction industry:

This industry today needs especially trained people who can transact and execute large projects within financing and time constraints. Similarly, facilities management (administration and management of buildings) and construction project management are emerging as largest employer in built environment sector.

Modern day built environment education is responding to this industry need, by delivering cutting edge professional skills to students, who continuously work on live projects along with industry experts. They are trained to independently deliver project with professional diligence. World over real estate and construction industry managers are embracing technology and big data for sustainable management of urban service and predictive modelling in their businesses.

Students need to learn about these technological applications while they are in school to remain competitive in job market.

Due to this amalgamation of industry and academia, now employability of graduates in built environment sector is not in question. Now issue is, how fast and how many professionals can be supplied to the industry. Merits for industry is obvious as they need not spend any money in training fresh executives to start working on projects, and it directly adds to their bottom line. Students must take notice of this undercurrent of built environment sector while taking their career decisions.