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Mark Coates – Bentley Systems vice president of infrastructure policy advancement

That’s the view of Bentley vice president of infrastructure policy advancement Mark Coates, whose team looks forward years ahead to the changing shape of industry. 

Coates is clear about why that change is occurring as well as the additional benefits – such as community engagement – of digital technology. 

Speaking to NCE at Bentley Systems’ Year In Infrastructure conference in Amsterdam, he noted that the skills gap, heavy workloads, along with the need for public support for many projects, means more must be done to help non-technical audiences understand what is happening, while helping engineers to use technical tools more easily and efficiently.  

Coates told NCE that the solution to both challenges could be the same – digital transformation.  

Productivity drivers 

There has been a shift in emphasis around technology recently, as technologists talk more about making it easier and quicker for engineers to meet their workloads. 

“A topic that’s not going to go away and hasn’t gone away over many years is the skills gap,” Coates told NCE. “It is not being filled in any way, shape or form. It still is as wide as it was.  

“These roles are not created overnight. It takes years to become an engineer, so we really need to build on the talent we’ve got. And that means helping engineers do more and do it more effectively.”  

Coates is clear, however, that this means approaching things differently. “We can’t just keep producing the same people we’ve been producing over recent years. For example, I’ve been working with the Chartered Institute of Civil Engineering Surveyors around a new role, and that is the digital surveyor. My personal background is a quantity surveying and there is a shift there from that sort of QS side to become more digital savvy.   

“So, I think we need to have a wider mindset and a wider scope and vision of bringing people into our industry that have a range of skills – and we also need to think about the diversity aspect as well. Digital technology can help there, making it possible to open our doors as an industry to people who may not have wanted to or can’t work on a site or work in an office five days a week.  

“Advanced visualisation systems and the digital aspects of things like digital twins and 3D simulation really do give people the ability to have a bit more freedom. But the counterbalance of that is experience. Working from home and not part of a team, that isolation is a risk and we need to just find that counterbalance to that as well.” 

This also has implications for the work when it is happening on the ground, with easier- to-use-tools and greater visualisation helping to reduce carbon and workload on a site.  

“Using technology to sort out logistics and schedules can help you get it right first time – that is absolutely critical. This is why we talk about whether a project is shovel worthy, not shovel ready. You need to go onto site with a lot of your drawings signed off, your mindset and your plans ready to go. Taking time to do that first is vital so industry needs to avoid the rush to get to site.”  

Public support 

Year In Infrastructure 2025 has focused on advanced visualisation and new AI tools within existing systems that can help speed up work and both make life easier for engineers, but also provide better outcomes for them, too.  

Coates, who was part of the London Crossrail team, sees this as a great opportunity for public engagement as well, with the same tools that help engineers to be productive, also helping the industry to communicate with non-technical audiences.  

“When you can visualise something, it is far easier to understand it. I can give you a great example of how far this has now come. When the Crossrail project first went out to the public, it was before the age of smart phones, and information went out as a piece of paper, there was a book, I can remember the letter itself and a box that had a black and white layover of the good old-fashioned London A to Z, with a whopping big red line in it, which was the local part of relating to that letter. 

“You wind that on to 2020 and go to Brisbane, where a lot of that knowledge from Crossrail went into to Cross River Rail, and they created an experience centre that used a full breadth and depth of digital interaction that people could go to, see, visualise, stand in the room, and you could actually see the curved screen of what was going on in the project.” 

This isn’t just about being a good corporate citizen. Public support for a project can improve the prospects of a project going forward, he adds.  

“That experience centre turned people that were not fully supportive of the project into advocates for it overnight because they could stand there and see the value of it.” 

The centre didn’t stop there, taking on another role as Brisbane won the hosting of the 2032 Olympic Games.  

“What was really interesting is that that centre was so successful that it went on to become the Brisbane Experience Centre, so it was no longer Cross River Rail Experience Centre because they won the Olympics and therefore people could go and see where the new stadium would be and what it would feel like.  

“That was great, too, for showing what the area would be after the Olympics. That means the public could see the future and sort of stand within it. But it was also great for investment opportunities because people could see the long-term aspect in a very visual way.” 

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