Construction Management: Reading Drawings & Specifications

- Hi, and welcome to another course in our construction management series. My name's Jim Rogers, and I'm really excited to share this important skill set with you. Now, I've been in the construction industry for many years, and I've seen firsthand that one of the skills that's lacking among many people in our industry is this ability to read construction drawings, plans, or blueprints, as we used to call them a few years back. Now, I recall learning blueprint reading, and even some basic drafting way back in high school shop class, but that doesn't seem to be a skill that's taught there anymore, and I think this is unfortunate because this really is an important skill to have in our construction industry.

So, whether you're working out in the field, or even in the sales, or business development departments, if you're in the construction industry, you really need to know how to read plans. Construction drawings contain the information, the instructions on what we're getting paid to build. They tell us what materials, parts and pieces, we need, and where to put them out there in the field. They're really the instructions that the designer has drawn up that translate the owner's ideas over into a reality.

Yet, it really is all too common to find that there's only one person on the crew who can actually read the drawings. Or to find people in sales who have to send the drawings back into their office just to get material quantities. And I've seen many instances where this inability to read the construction drawings has kept a person from advancing from crew member up to crew leader. So, in this course I'm going to start to give you the ability to fix this problem. We'll walk through all of the different components that make up our construction plans, from the title block that appears on every page down to the small notes and details.

We'll cover information from plan views to elevations, and everything in-between. So, stick with me, and let's get started learning how to read construction drawings.