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On October 9, 2015, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued new regulations. This was another significant set of rules issued by the ministry regarding the qualifications of construction companies, following those issued on January 31, 2015. Below are the two policies that have a direct impact on construction engineer certificates:
The main key points of interpretation are: 1. Old certificates can be directly replaced with new ones, and there is no longer a need to count the number of construction engineers. 2. When applying for new construction qualifications for a company, the number of engineers required is taken into consideration. 3. The upgrading of a company’s construction qualifications requires an assessment of the number of construction engineers it has. 4. For additional qualifications, the number of construction engineers required is subject to assessment. 5. When upgrading a company’s qualifications or adding new ones, the existing qualifications are not assessed. 6. After the old certificates are replaced with new ones, the housing and construction departments in various provinces shall verify whether the relevant enterprises meet the standards for the new qualifications. No assessment is carried out at the time of certificate renewal, but random inspections are required.
Total number of architects required = Number of enterprises with various qualifications × Number of architects required per enterprise. (Project impacts are not considered for now.) We need to pay attention to two factors: “the number of enterprises with various qualifications” and “the number of requirements per enterprise”. 1. The number of requirements per enterprise is mainly determined by the \"Qualification Standards for Construction Enterprises\“. This notice does not make any adjustments to the number of construction engineers specified in those standards, so the number of construction engineers required per enterprise remains unchanged. 2. Number of enterprises with various qualifications: Following the issuance of the Notice, efforts have been made to retain as many construction enterprises as possible; the number of enterprises will not decrease due to the need for revalidation of their credentials. If the original requirements for revalidation – such as assessing the qualifications of construction engineers – were applied, a large number of enterprises would be unable to complete the revalidation process. Some of these enterprises might switch to other industries, downgrade their status, or go out of business, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of enterprises. Consequently, the total demand for construction engineers would also decrease. Based on the above analysis, it is easy to conclude that the overall demand for architects in the construction industry will not decrease as a result of the issuance of the Notice! The actual number of architects required will depend on the intensity of the dynamic inspections of qualifications during and after the project is underway, as well as on whether the measures outlined in the Notice are followed – namely, to strengthen supervision during and after the project phase and to conduct periodic checks to determine whether enterprises in the region that hold qualifications in the construction industry meet the relevant standard requirements. ”We’ll have to wait and see!