A twenty-day training to enter the trade. Revit, families, coordination, delivery
by Diego Rodríguez Renovales · Diego Rodríguez Renovales
BIM is not 3D drawing. It is information management.
Twenty days, from zero to a production-ready junior BIM technician. Written because that training was not packaged anywhere — and because I hire the people who need it.
The premise is on page one: a building is constructed in data first, so errors surface when fixing them costs minutes of software instead of weeks of construction. Everything else follows from that.
The plan runs twenty days with a fixed structure. Day 0 is the workshop: hardware, installation, file naming without accents or spaces, and an Airtable database for cataloging families. Then architecture and parametric logic — modeling through relationships rather than typing static dimensions; family creation in four layers (skeleton, parameters, locked geometry, clean 2D symbol); structure, MEP and data; and finally cloud coordination, BEP review, clash detection, and sheet assembly.
Three rules run through the book. The schedule audits the model: quantity schedules are the final product, and an empty cell means the model is wrong. LOD is a promise of reliability, not of visual detail — modeling above the requested LOD is waste, below it is an incomplete delivery. And in MEP, equipment without logical connectors is decoration.
The closing section is professional rather than technical: how to raise an RFI with a closed question and a proposed solution, what delivery actually means (uploading a purged, reviewed model to the right CDE folder, not emailing a file), and the three-line daily report that removes the need for micromanagement. In this trade reliability beats speed — the market is not looking for fast artists, it is looking for notaries of information.
Diego Rodríguez Renovales is an architect and systems architect. Founder of BIM XL, former Office Managing Director at Gensler Monterrey and former National Manager of Architecture at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He writes from Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.