This is the fourth episode of The openBIM Practitioner.
In this series, I talk with people who have passed the buildingSMART Practitioner certification and ask them what the process was really like, what changed for them, and what others should understand before going for it.
My guest in this episode is Paul-Christian Max from Germany.
Paul-Christian leads digitalization and BIM at Afry in Leipzig. He is a structural and bridge engineer with more than 10 years of openBIM experience, and he recently completed the buildingSMART Practitioner path in Germany.
In this conversation, we talk about why he decided to take Practitioner even though he already had years of real project experience, why his company invested in it before any client asked, and why a certificate can be useful proof of BIM competence when a client wants to see it.
Paul-Christian is honest about something many experienced people feel. The certification did not teach him much that was new. After more than 10 years in openBIM, a few hours of training cannot replace what he learned on real projects. What the certificate gives him is proof he can show, not knowledge he was missing.
We also talk about what Practitioner does not give you. It does not replace experience. It does not give you one solution for every project. And it does not remove the need to work with real people, real models, and real project problems. He is clear that you should not trust someone who holds the certificate but has no real experience behind it.
The main message is clear. Practitioner is not for complete beginners. You need real BIM experience first. You need to understand why clean information and IFC matter. You need to work with the tools and standards. And you need to take the exam seriously, because it is genuinely challenging.
We discuss why Afry decided to build its own IFC based standard before any client required it, why openBIM is mostly for internal coordination and not only a client demand, why Deutsche Bahn still asks for native files even though it is not useful, why you are out of the game if you cannot deliver IFC, why Paul-Christian went for Practitioner, why his company chose to certify a few key people, why real experience should come before the exam, what surprised him about the exam, why one task was written for a single tool even though the certification should be tool agnostic, why time pressure was harder than the technical questions, what he felt was missing from the training such as geo referencing and infrastructure, the most useless openBIM requirements he has seen on projects like clash free models and native file delivery, why custom property sets that duplicate the IFC schema are a waste, why the people who write requirements should be certified first, the difference between IFC schema and IFC file and why confusing them causes real problems, how a weekly meeting with all BIM coordinators keeps his team sharp, who should consider Practitioner, and who should not.
If you are considering buildingSMART Practitioner certification, this conversation will give you a realistic view of what to expect.
Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petruconduraru/
Questions: petru@bimvoice.com
