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One of the most fascinating facts about the Irish Construction industry is that there is no legal requirement for a construction company to hold any from of construction insurance! In fact, the only insurance an Irish contractor is legally obliged to have is basic motor insurance on his/her motor vehicles!

Although there is no legal requirement under Irish law for a contractor to hold adequate Construction Insurance it is extremely vital that adequate cover is in place.

One of the most vital reasons is the high injury & mortality rate on Irish Construction sites. One major positive of the recent construction boom is the fatality per thousand ratio has fallen in recent years although it is still at an unacceptable level.

For example, in 2001 28% of workplace fatalities were Construction related and the Irish Construction industry is consistently second only to the Irish Agriculture& Forestry Industry.

As many primary contractors require their subcontractors to hold Construction Insurance the reality is that although Construction Insurance is not a legal requirement it is usually a prerequisite to obtaining work on the majority of the countries construction sites so the need for construction insurance is a necessity in everything but law!

Although Construction Insurance is quite a complex field the four main areas of cover are as follows:

• Public Liability Insurance

• Employers Liability Insurance

• Contractors All Risks

• Personal Accident

Public Liability Insurance

Public liability insurance [PL] provides cover in the event that the policyholder is sued by a third party who feels that they have suffered injury or loss as a result of the policyholders negligence (lack of care).

Consider the following examples where Public Liability Insurance will provide cover:

• You run a plumbing company. One day you are called to an office to sort out a problem in their kitchen. Accidentally, you burst a pipe, and flood the office. Your client then makes a claim against you for the hurt to their carpet and computer systems which have been hurt by the water.

• You are a building contractor. While walking along scaffolding one of your men drops a piece of equipment which falls to the street, injuring a passing pedestrian. The pedestrian makes a claim against your firm.

Obviously these are very simplified examples and we haven’t discussed the complexities of Products Liability/Liability Law/Duty of Care etc but it should provide a basic understanding of Public Liability Insurance.

Employers Liability Insurance

Employers Liability Insurance [EL] provides cover if any of your employees suffer physical injury or death, and it is proven that as an employer you acted negligently and subsequently could have prevented their loss. If they then choose to pursue you for compensation the insurer will pay the cost of the claim.

Consider the following examples where Employers Liability Insurance will provide cover:

• You run a carpentry company. One of your employees loses a finger while using a chop saw and decides to claim against you for his injury

• You are a scaffolding contractor and are erecting scaffolding around an apartment block. While erecting the scaffolding one of your employees falls and suffers severe bodily injury. He decides to claim against your firm.

Please note that Public & Employers Liability is offered ‘hand in hand’, that is when arranging construction insurance you will need to arrange both Public Liability & Employers Liability Insurance together [Also known as Combined Liability Insurance] as Employers Liability Insurance is not available on a ‘Stand Alone’ basis..

Contractors All Risks Insurance

Contractors All Risks insurance (also known as Contract Works insurance) is an insurance policy specially designed for builders and a number of other trades working at a contract site. Contractors All Risks insurance can include cover for contract works, own plant, hired-in plant and employee’s tools. The main part of the contractors all risks insurance is the contract works section which provides cover for the property being worked on (e.g. new house, etc.). But, cover for the existing property is excluded (e.g. the existing structure when building an extension) and must continue to be insured under its own insurance cover.

Consider the following examples where Contractors All Risks Insurance will provide cover:

• You are a building contractor and are building a house for resale. So far you have spent €200,000 on materials and labour. The property catches fire and is ruined before it has been completed. • You are groundwork’s contractor and are presently digging foundations for a new housing development. Naturally you leave your excavator on site until the contract is completed but one night your excavator is stolen.

Personal Accident Insurance

Personal Accident Insurance [Also known as Income Protection Insurance] is highly recommended for a sole traders, business partners and company directors as a combined liability policy does not cover any injury caused to a sole trader/business partner while it is extremely hard for a company director to sue his/her own company. A policy can be tailored to your exact needs and policies include a tax free monthly benefit, a lump sum [capital benefit] and hospital cash.

Consider the following examples where Personal Accident Insurance will provide cover:

• You’re a self employed carpenter with no employees. You cut your hand and are unable to work for eight months. As you have Personal Accident cover you receive a tax free benefit of €1,500 after one month and continue to receive this amount until you return to work.

• Although Personal Accident/Income Protection insurance is no substitute for full time earnings it will provide you with an income if you are unable to earn and it will reduce your financial worries at a time when your recovery should be your number one priority.

Machinery & Plant Insurance

Machinery & Plant Insurance is normally arranged on a case by case basis and provides Accidental Hurt Fire & Theft Cover on Machinery. This policy is normally taken by contractors who wish to cover a specific number of items.

Health & Safety Executive

In Ireland the HSE [Health & Safety Executive] have the ultimate authority over Construction Sites and have the ability to close a site if they feel it is a safety hazard. Their primary initiative is the ‘Safe Pass’ – a one day site safety training programme.

Who needs to do Safe Pass awareness training?

Safe Pass is a one-day safety awareness programme aimed at general construction workers, craft workers and “on site” security personnel in the construction industry. The aims of the programme are to:

• raise the standard of safety awareness in the construction industry

• ensure that site personnel after completing the one day awareness programme can make a positive contribution to the prevention of accidents and ill health while working on the site

• maintain a register of personnel who have received training

• provide participants with a FAS Safe Pass registration card, indicating that the holder has attended a formal course in health and safety awareness

Under the Safety Health and Welfare at Work (Construction) Regulations 2006 Safe Pass / Safety Awareness Programmes applies to -

(a) craft and general construction workers,

(b) persons undertaking on-site security work, and

(c) persons or classes of persons as may be prescribed by the Minister.

For more information on Irish Site Safety please visit the website of the Health & Safety Authority www.hsa.ie while for more information relating to Irish Construction Insurance please visit the website of Keystone Insurance www.keystone.ie, Ireland’s premier supplier of Construction Insurance

Workplace accidents can ostensibly occur in any work atmosphere, with the responsibility for providing a safe working environment resting on the shoulders of the employer. But, construction sites seems to offer a more hazardous locale than other workplace environments, such as a store or office setting. This need not be the case, and construction accidents can be easily prevented by putting into place rigid and enforceable safety practices at all construction sites. For example, the general contractor and all subcontractors should be required to make and maintain a reasonably safe work site, with warnings of any dangers inherent in the site and the work to be done there. There should also be an emphasis place on the hiring of careful employees, with coordination of job safety as well as supervision to ensure compliance with all safety specifications. Additionally, all site workers should be adequately trained in the proper operation of all equipment on site and the site itself must be managed in keeping with all legal standards in order to prevent any construction sit accidents.

Even with precautions and adherence to safety practices, construction site injuries can still occur due to the inadequacy of these provisions. Accidents involving defective or collapsing scaffolds can result in construction site accident cases; falls off of or through roofing structures; electrocutions; falls off of ladders; defective machinery such as cranes, hoists, conveyors, tractors, and forklifts; malfunctioning construction equipment or other tools; and the collapse of floors or walls. The kinds of construction site accidents often result in serious injury and can sometimes even result in death. In fact, thousands of construction workers are injured or killed in construction site accidents each year.

Construction Site Accidents and Workers’ Compensation

Virtually all significant injuries suffered in construction site accidents give rise to workers’ compensation rights. The Workers’ Compensation Act provides benefits to workers who are injured on the job. Unfortunately, Workers’ Compensation alone may be insufficient compensation especially in the case of very serious and catastrophic personal injuries which happen often in construction site accidents. The rights are dependent on the interpretation and application of several complicated laws and individual circumstances of the construction accident.

But, these limited workers’ compensation rights may be supplemented by legal actions against others who have responsibility for various activities on a construction site including construction managers, general contractors, subcontractors, equipment manufacturers, etc. When a construction site accident occurs, the owners, architects, insurance companies and manufacturers of equipment can be held responsible for inadequate safety provisions.

As an example, in many construction undertakings, several different contractors are involved. Full hurts can be recovered if any contractor other than the direct employer has responsibility for the injuries. Likewise, if a defective tool, machine, or other product causes injury, an injured worker can be fully compensated.

The real estate industry is in boom these days, especially, for the real estate developers and companies, who are operating in the commercial construction sector. The world is experiencing a technological boom these days and as a result, many things are changing including the way we lead our life. With the help of internet, today we just need a few clicks of the mouse to buy anything right from booking our tickets to buying our monthly grocery. All this has brought about a boom in the commercial construction sector. Many multinational offices are opening up their branches in India and several other countries and for that they require the services of commercial construction professionals to construct their offices. There are several companies that are working in the field of commercial construction and you can very easily find such companies through the internet.

There are certain things that you will have to be careful of when you are working with a commercial construction company. You must work with a reputed name in the field of commercial construction, you can either get a new commercial complex constructed or you can just take on rent the place they have constructed. If you have a plot of land where you would like your office to be constructed, you can just plot with the officials about the type of office you want to get constructed. Today more and more people are turning their interest towards vastu shastra, an ancient Indian art for architecture and construction while building their commercial or residential premises. Most of the construction companies have a vaastu expert on board to help and advice people who want to use this for constructing their houses or offices.

For commercial construction you need proper plotting and designing, therefore, it is very vital that you sit down with your architect and choose what all things you want to have in your office. The cost of construction is going to be very high, so make sure that you talk to the commercial construction people about this so that you have a clear thought about how much money will be required for this and you can arrange money accordingly. They will be able to give you a clear thought about the money by taking a look at the plotting costs, services cost and also the implementation cost.

The commercial construction company must make sure that they have the right type of professionals working for them. Once you hand over the work to the commercial construction company, you can rest easy as it is their duty to do the work for you perfectly. Of course from time to time you can take a look at the kind of work that is being done for you and you can always suggest changes and alternation that you want to be made. But, make sure that you plot out all things well in advance or it can be hard to make changes in the plot once the construction starts.

Finding new employees to fill Construction Management Jobs Openings is always a hard prospect for any employer. It is like rolling dice: the employer is gambling that he will find a candidate who went to a excellent technical school and completed the bachelor’s degree requirements to get certified in the academic fields of civil engineering, construction management, or construction science and thus be the best person to hire for those Construction Management Jobs Openings. What adds on to the pressure on the employer is that Construction Management Jobs Openings may need to be filled in quick if he has clients presenting Construction Projects to be bidded on.

One of the worst ways to fill Construction Management Jobs Openings is to hire relatives –especially relatives who lack any kind of experience in the field of Construction Management aside from an internship or two maybe. There is some value to hiring only candidates who have the best technical prowess for this highly technical field.

Reckon about it carefully: what do we do in Construction Management Jobs? Answer: we build structures. And not just any kind of structures – in Construction Management Jobs, the employees build roads, bridges and buildings. So where is the problem then in hiring a relative to fill Construction Management Jobs Openings?

The problem lies not so much in the fact that your new hiree is a relative but the fact that employers who hire relatives are often under duress from other relatives to hire family members. And when an employer is under duress, the Construction Management Jobs Openings may go to someone who is not so skilled, not so experienced, and really green for the job – but is family. In this kind of situation, a prudent employer would hear warning bells going off in his head already.

Those warning bells may be remarkably similar to the sound of the ambulances racing to the scene of the jobsite where the greenhorn employee has jurisdiction over. There are any number of potentially perilous decisions a greenhorn relative-employee could make after filling one of the Construction Management Jobs Openings. As a Construction Manager, he might have ordered sub-standard cement and sub-standard steel for a building being constructed. Maybe he had the company’s interests at heart (saying to himself: if I save some money by ordering sub-standard cement and steel, the company benefits at the bottom line.) But, this greenhorn has just place every single person working at the jobsite in mortal peril by ordering sub-standard cement and sub-standard steel. And if by some miracle the building still gets built without any accidents or casualties, that building is still a perilous structure that should never have been built at all.

In the Reader’s Digest back in the 1970s, they ran an article about a certain hotel where dancers were enjoying the music at two pedestrian walkways that had been built one over the other. These walkways were like mini-bridges connecting the two sides of the building to one another, so that if you were at the lower walkway you would be directly beneath the second walkway. Well, to the shock and amazement of all, the upper walkway broke loose (cement, steel and all) from its moorings to the sides of the building and fell – straight onto the lower walkway were people were trapped, immobilized with dread. The dancers on the lower walkway were pinned to their death. The cause was the use of sub-standard construction materials and a faulty architectural design – a right tale that you can easily verify by going through the Reader’s Digest archives.

“But my cousin/son/brother/nephew would never do something like that!,” the employer who offered the Construction Management Jobs Openings to the relative may say. Well, maybe the greenhorn relative might not deliberately make such an error – but the reason you should never hire a greenhorn for sensitive

Construction Management Jobs Openings is because, well, he is green and may make errors that are not only costly in the end financially, but may wind up killing many people too.

Construction Management Jobs Openings belong only to the best and the brightest in the field. Allow a relative to be hired for one of your Construction Management Jobs Openings only if he is the best and the brightest that you know for the job. Because the main responsibility an employer posting Construction Management Jobs Openings has is to assure the safety of the project first –everything else is secondary.

So you got your degree in either civil engineering, construction management, or construction science from your accredited college or university of choice after years of patient dedication to your field of discipline. But now that you have your degree, where do you go to find Construction Management Jobs?

One option that lies open to you is to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado. You may baulk at the thought because you don’t know anyone in Denver and you’ve never been there. Well, you may be surprised at what awaits those who find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado.

At one company that does offer Construction Management jobs in Denver, a Construction Manager in the field of mining (which is one area you should look into when you try to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado) stands to earn from US,000 per year up to a maximum of US0,000 in base pay alone. This company also grants bonuses, per diem and car types of compensation aside from that huge base pay to the lucky employee who tried find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado and wound up with them.

As you explore ways to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado, do your research first as to why you should bother to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado. Aside from mining, you can also find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado, in the environmental concerns industry. Try to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado in other boom-time industries too like oil refining/petroleum/drilling. It depends of course on what your strengths are, but it seems that if you’re excellent at what you do, word will get out and you may find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado, hunting you down with job offers instead.

You may be skeptical and question: Is that possible? Employers looking for me rather than me looking for them? Oh, it’s not only possible, that is what is happening. BH Careers International revealed that 80% of the time, you don’t find find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado (or other places for that matter) simply because employers don’t actively advertise openings – rather, around 50% of employees get their jobs because they know someone who knows someone who happens to know how to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado (and then proceeds to do that for the lucky future employee without him even asking.) Bingo! You were able to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado, without even lifting a finger.

Another fantastic way to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado, is to attend those job and career fairs at your alma mater that you never gave a thought to before. These school events are usually initiated by the school career plotting department (sometimes connected to the school guidance counselor’s office.) Much of the time, you can get free information on how to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado through company representatives who come to visit the job and career fairs, and you may even be able to submit your resume to these people.

Here’s a tip about getting hired: if you are among the top 15% to top 25% of your graduating class, you may not need to exert much effort to find Construction Management Jobs in Denver, Colorado because the school may have forwarded information about your stellar academic performance to companies they are in contact with already. And in very technical fields like Construction Management, the smartest often get the best jobs, because companies need the only the best graduates to work for them.