WEEK-INTENSIVE ESTIMATING COURSE
FROM ZERO
TO CONFIDENT.
IN ONE WEEK.
A full week of immersive, practical estimating training, built from first principles and delivered by active construction professionals at a dedicated professional training facility.
THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY HAS AN ESTIMATING PROBLEM.
Experienced estimators are retiring faster than they are being replaced. Graduates arrive with academic knowledge, but no practical grounding. Career changers bring valuable transferable skills, but don't know where to start commercially. SME business owners are pricing jobs on instinct, hope, and what they charged on previous jobs, but with no framework behind it.
The CBA Week-Intensive Estimating Course was built to fix that.
This is five days of focused, hands-on estimating training, no filler, no PowerPoint-heavy theory sessions, no content that doesn't have a direct practical application. By the end of the week, you will understand how construction estimates are built from the ground up, how rates are derived, how risk is priced, and how a professional tender submission is structured and presented. You will leave with real skills, worked examples and reference materials you can use from day one.
The course is delivered at Pippingford Park, a dedicated professional training facility in the heart of the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. Other venues can be arranged if there are enough candidates. The course is led by David Clark FCInstCES MCIOB, Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and Chartered Construction Manager, a commercial director, with decades of real world estimating and commercial management experience, with a proven track record if industry leadership.
THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU IF...
The Week-Intensive Estimating Course is designed for four distinct groups. If you recognise yourself in any of them, this course is built with you in mind.
◆ Career Changers & Multi-Discipline Professionals
You've built a career in another part of construction, on site, in engineering, in project management, or in another profession entirely. You want to move into a commercial or estimating role. You understand the industry. You know how jobs work. What you need is the commercial framework to go with it.
This course gives you that framework in a week.
◆ Apprentices & Graduates
You've completed your studies and you have the academic foundations. But there is a gap between what you've learned in the classroom and what you'll be expected to do on your first day in an estimating role. You want some real world-led practical experience.
This course closes that gap. Practical, applied, and built around the way estimating actually works in the real world, not the way it's described in textbooks.
◆ SME Business Owners
You've been pricing your own work for years. You win jobs, you deliver them, and sometimes you make good money and sometimes you don't, you're not always sure why. You want to understand estimating properly: how to build a rate, how to assess risk, how to price a job so that the margin you expect is the margin you get.
This course gives you the structure and the discipline behind the numbers, so you can price with confidence, not instinct.
◆ Corporate & Employer Bookings — Tier One and Main Contractors
The estimating skills shortage is one of the most pressing talent challenges facing tier one and main contractors right now. Graduate intake programmes, apprenticeship completions and career-change hires all create the same challenge: technically capable people who need intensive commercial grounding before they can contribute fully in an estimating function.
The Week-Intensive Estimating Course is available for corporate bookings. Send your people for a week and they come back ready to work. Speak to us about group rates and bespoke arrangements for larger cohorts.
THE COURSE — WHAT WE COVER
The course is structured across five days and builds progressively, each day's learning connects directly to the next.
Every session is practical, with worked examples throughout.
◆ Day 1 — Foundations of Construction Estimating
What estimating is, what it isn't, and why it matters. The estimating process from receipt of tender documents to submission. How professional estimating functions are structured and where you fit within them.
◆ Day 2 — Building Rates from First Principles
Labour, plant and material analysis in detail. How to build an all-in rate from scratch. Understanding outputs, gang structures, waste factors and market rates. This is the engine room of estimating — and most people have never been properly shown how it works.
◆ Day 3 — Pricing the Job
Applying your rates to a real bill of quantities. Measured work, provisional sums, PC sums and dayworks. Structuring a price that is complete, coherent and defensible.
◆ Day 4 — Risk, Opportunity & Tender Strategy
How to identify, assess and price risk. Programme risk, ground risk, scope risk and commercial risk. How to build contingency intelligently rather than arbitrarily. Tender adjudication, how the final submission price is arrived at and why.
◆ Day 5 — Prelims, Overheads & Submission
Structuring and pricing preliminaries. Understanding overheads and profit. Putting the submission together, what a professional tender looks like, what it contains and how it is presented. Final review and course assessment.
YOUR OUTCOMES
EVERY DELEGATE LEAVES THE WEEK-INTENSIVE ESTIMATING COURSE WITH:
✓ A thorough working knowledge of construction estimating from first principles
✓ A set of worked examples, covering various stages of the estimating process
✓ Rate-building templates and reference materials for immediate use
✓ A course reference pack, a resource you will return to throughout your career
✓ Access to the CBA professional community and support network
✓ A CBA Certificate of Completion
WHERE THE COURSE IS DELIVERED
The Week-Intensive Estimating Course is delivered at Pippingford Park, a professional training facility set within the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. It is a focused, distraction-free environment that takes delegates away from the noise of the working week and puts them in the right headspace to learn.
This is not a hotel meeting room hired for the week. Pippingford Park is a dedicated setting for professional development, and the environment is part of what makes the week work.
Location: Pippingford Park, Ashdown Forest, East Sussex Duration: Five days, Monday to Friday Group size: A small number of cohorts, ensuring quality of delivery and individual attention.
PRICING & HOW TO BOOK
Pricing is available on application and varies depending on whether you are booking as an individual or as a corporate/employer.
◆ Individual places — available on a course-by-course basis, subject to availability
◆ Corporate / employer bookings — group rates available; bespoke arrangements for larger cohorts or in-house delivery, contact us to discuss
Course dates are released on a rolling basis. Early enquiry is strongly recommended as places are limited by design.
No commitment required. We'll be in touch with upcoming dates as soon as they're confirmed.
WHO DELIVERS IT?
This course is designed and delivered by David Clark FCInstCES MCIOB, Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, Chartered Construction Manager, and Commercial Director, with decades of experience in construction estimating and commercial management at the highest level of the industry.
David also delivers CPD events for the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, having a long track record of training and mentoring construction professionals across the UK. This is not a course written by a training company and delivered by an associate.
It is built from David's own experience and delivered by him personally.
Completed the course and want to keep developing?
Our 1-to-1 Professional Mentoring offers ongoing support as you put your new skills into practice
— working directly with David on the real commercial challenges you face in your role or business.
