Employer Profile: Oldcastle Building Envelope

If you didn’t know by now, Pickens Technical College’s Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) program trains students for long careers in the engineering, design, and construction fields. CAD is a popular program at PTC because of the many doors this skill can open. Many companies in the Denver area are looking for skilled employees who can use their CAD software to design everything from machine parts to architecture.

One company that is always looking for young talent, especially young talent that can use CAD software, is Oldcastle Building Envelope. They make custom-engineered and designed products specifically for building envelopes (walls, windows, rooves, storefront designs, etc.). Some of these products include window walls, architectural windows, storefront systems, doors, skylights, and architectural glass. These products have to be manufactured exactly to fit the specifications of Oldcastle’s clients, all of whom expect a wide portfolio of building envelope components all from the same company.

Oldcastle uses a complex CAD program called BIM IQ to combine product visualization and build product performance into the process from the start. Its BIM IQ Render feature provides design engineers with physically accurate building product visualizations of an architectural product. Designers can use this to generate real-time imagery in local servers or using the cloud. Combined with BIM IQ Energy, which provides product performance feedback for a designer’s decisions when they can still make affordable changes to the product. Oldcastle uses several other proprietary programs to design components for building envelopes such as the estimating tool VistaVision and the glass specification tool GlasSelect.

Truly talented CAD engineers could probably go further into all of the great things that Oldcastle’s BIM IQ can do to help digitally design building envelopes and their components, but students of the CAD program at PTC have a leg up on learning this software and using it to help Oldcastle’s clients. Suzanne Payne, the CAD instructor at PTC, immerses her students in how to use several CAD programs, including AutoCAD for two-dimensional images, Solidworks for three-dimensional mechanical design, and Revit for three-dimensional architectural design. Learning these three programs gives students not only firsthand experience in these in-demand programs, but it also gives students the tools to learn additional programs such as BIM IQ.

Oldcastle and companies like it tend to hire students with a proven track record of learning new skills quickly and accurately. Payne and indeed the entire staff at PTC train students in specific skills they’ll need in their career of choice, but they also give students the tools to pick up new skills along the way. That’s what employers like Oldcastle Building Envelope are looking for. They want employees who can learn and grow with them in the long term. Students with many skills and a background in learning new CAD software programs are sought after by Oldcastle.

For more information on how to connect with Oldcastle representatives looking for PTC students to hire, contact the extremely useful Career Services Office on campus to visit with the venerable Gill Thompson.