Better Learning Starts with Clearer Goals | Jackie Baxley of HRP Associates

Hello and welcome to the Smarter by Design podcast. I'm your host, Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, and today I'm joined by Jackie Baxley, principal and practice leader for environmental health, safety, and sustainability at HRP Associates. Our topic: better learning starts with clearer goals. So Jackie has spent years helping HRP evolve from a more organic apprenticeship learning culture into a more intentional learning organization that thinks about competency, capability, incentives, mentorship, and organizational performance. One of the central ideas that Jackie returns to throughout this conversation is that not every learning experience is trying to accomplish the same thing. And organizations oftentimes get into trouble when they fail to define the actual goal upfront. Is the goal simply communication? Is it awareness, skills development, demonstrated competency? Those different goals require different approaches, different investments, and different ways of evaluating success. Jackie, in this episode, walks us through the practical frameworks HRP uses to think more intentionally about learning design, including her inverted pyramid model of communication, awareness, training, and competency, as well as the EDGE framework, which stands for educate, demonstrate, guide, and evaluate. We explore why awareness is not the same thing as competency, why repetition matters, how HRP approaches skills validation and quality audits, and why some learning experiences work best asynchronously while others must remain in person. The conversation also explores the operational and economic realities of learning inside AEC firms. Jackie discusses how HRP has worked to remove the stigma around training and development by redesigning incentives, rethinking billability, and treating learning as a strategic investment rather than overhead. If you lead an AEC firm, manage teams, oversee operations, or are thinking about how to scale expertise more intentionally inside your organization, this episode offers a thoughtful and highly practical conversation about designing learning around real outcomes. It's a conversation about clearer goals, stronger capability development, and building modern learning organizations that keep getting smarter by design. Okay, Jackie Baxley on better learning starts with clearer goals. Here we go.

If the future's got a little grime, at least you know the train will come on time. We took the fight.

You are Jackie Baxley, Principal and Practice Leader for Environmental Health, Safety and Sustainability at HRP Associates. It's a multidisciplinary environmental and engineering consulting firm serving both public and private sector clients. You and your firm are in the LMS beta for Synthesis. And what drew me to you and made me want to invite you on Smarter by Design is how thoughtful you've been in terms of crafting your firm's approach to learning. And especially, and we're going to spend a lot of time here, is being very explicit around the goals of learning, what good looks like, measurement, competencies, being precise around language. Something I've learned from you is kind of an emphasis on a difference between organizations that hold learning events and ones that build capabilities. And so we want to dig into that today, but I'd like to get started with a sense of HRP and then kind of your role at HRP. So if you could kind of give us a picture of that, be good, a good place to start.

Yeah, great. And thanks, Christopher, for having me on the podcast here. So my role at HRP as the practice leader, as you said in your introduction, is both an inward-facing role and an outward-facing role. And inwardly facing, I'm looking at our team. I'm looking at our team of practitioners relative to environmental health and safety compliance. And sustainability. Those practitioners are working with our clients to understand their regulatory footprint, to understand maybe what gaps they have in their regulatory programs, and to help them fill in those gaps. So I work with our practitioners to ensure skills development and professional development and quality assurance and quality control tools. So that's the very inward-facing side of my role. And then the outward-facing side of my role is also doing all the same things that our practitioners are doing, helping clients understand their risk, navigate their risk, design sustainable programs to mitigate compliance and issues that might surround the, the stakeholders.

If you were to try and take a guess at your, how you split your time between internal and external, what do you think it would be?

Oh goodness. Pick a week. It can be very different. There are some weeks where I'm very, we maybe we have a big project, Maybe it involves a lot of oversight from, you know, a level such as mine. And so there are some weeks where it could be upwards of 75% of my time is outward focusing. And then similarly, there could be some weeks where the external stakeholders are being managed and controlled perfectly well within our team, and I'm not having to be brought in on higher-level consulting or needs or issues. And Then I'm primarily working on our controls and protocols and improving those controls and protocols and just kind of building sustainable operations within our practice.

Where did that kind of passion for learning and building— you're doing knowledge management, right? You might not call it that, but like, I watch that with a lot of what you're doing. You're doing knowledge management, you're doing learning development, even though you're not a knowledge manager or a learning development person. Where did that interest in doing that come from and how soon did you start doing that kind of work for your company?

So I've been in the practice leader role maybe about 10 years, give or take. I should probably know that better than I do. I started with the company as a practitioner, as what we now call a senior consultant, worked my way through project management and have been in the practice leader role. We'll just say 10 years. I don't recall how long. And, and So learning management is consulting, honestly. You know, we don't make, we don't make a tool, we don't make a part, we don't make 2x4s, right? Our product is our people. And so our people need to be well-versed in understanding the regulations, well-versed in understanding how those regulations apply differently to different types of clients, maybe different types of industry, even different states and municipalities. Sometimes really learning is critical in consulting because if you're not constantly learning, then you're not providing the best advice for your clients and your stakeholder group. So I wouldn't say that there was a moment that the interest became peak or prime or essential as much as it's always been baked into, to the cake.

I think that's— I like what you said. I think that's true for all AEC firms. Like, you know, we work with a lot of companies and so I kind of spot things that are outliers. And I think some of the things that I think I've noticed about the way that you're working is there's this, you know, the kind of oldest way that we've learned in our industry is through apprenticeship and learning by doing and shadowing somebody. And they're there to catch you when you fall and kind of give you slightly harder assignments. I'm sure there's plenty of that happening at HRP. But there's this other kind of much more intentional, organized approach to making sure that people consistently get information. When you stepped into the role as a consultant, was it already heavily organized and intentional like that, or is that something that you think has changed?

I would say it has significantly changed, and largely in part because our company has changed. You know, I started just a little, just to step back a little bit more in time. I started my career in industry. About the first third of my career, I was in industry. I was an environmental engineer in the textile industry and then in the chemical industry. The last two-thirds of my career, I've been in consulting. And when I first started with HRP, we were a smaller company. And so our infrastructure was smaller because we were we were smaller. So our infrastructure has really expanded and evolved. And to speak to the platform that we use from knowledge architecture, we call it Hike. So if you hear me say Hike, I am talking about our knowledge architecture platform. It is an acronym. I think it stands for HRP Information Knowledge Exchange, but I think we were just trying to find a word that had an appropriate acronym.

So it's a very common— people start with the word and they work backwards. Right, exactly.

For sure.

So when I say Hike, I'm talking about our knowledge architecture platform. So when I first started with HRP, gosh, I think it was— I have to think, how old is my son? When was he born? So I started in 2007 at HRP, and in 2007 we had an intranet platform that grew and evolved and got unwieldy over time because it was just It was very organic and more you just added to as opposed to took away anything. And, you know, we used that system for a long time and then we started to engage with Knowledge Architecture and we had this whole wonderful rollout plan and then the pandemic hit and we're like, we can't wait. We need to make sure we have all of this. So our infrastructure has really evolved, we'll say, you know, in the last, you know, 6 or 7 years with the platforms that we're using with knowledge architecture. We always had the same information. It was just maybe harder to find.

Right.

So remind me what your question is because I got off on a tangent.

Yeah, no, no, that's fine. That's fine. No, but I think there is the kind of— there's the technology and the infrastructure, but I suppose there's like a mindset. So as an example, you've shared this inverse pyramid that you use when you're thinking about training. And being clear about what's a, what, why are we doing this training for awareness? Is it for communication? Is it for competency? What are we trying to do? And I, and you've got actually got competencies mapped out for your people, which I do want to get to. That's a kind of a level of sophistication that not all firms get to that goes well beyond technology.

And to be clear, we're not there. We're still very much on our journey, very much on our road, right? The, the— just for anybody out there that might think, oh, we're so much farther ahead than other folks, we're just getting caught trying is where we are right now in our journey. But so there's aspirational and there's actual, right? And we are somewhere in between that aspirational and actual right now. So we have H.I.K.E. where we have our written protocols, we have our programs, we have our procedure, we have historical training, we have information. And then what you were speaking to, kind of our, our inverse pyramid, I brought that into our vernacular, if you will, mainly from my experience in working with ISO management systems. So ISO management systems is something that we help our clients with, our stakeholders with, whether they're seeking ISO 14001 certification for an environmental management system or 45001 for an occupational health and safety management system. That inverse pyramid is the way my mind works. I'm an engineer by education. I need to see things sometimes to understand them.

Mm-hmm.

So that inverse pyramid is what I've baked into a lot of our consultation relative to management systems. Because if you look at the ISO 14001 platform, for example, for an environmental management system, it speaks very specifically your environmental communication. Needs to address X, Y, and Z, or be based off of X, Y, and Z. Your awareness needs to include, your competency needs to address. And, and so I created that pyramid initially as I was doing training for our stakeholders and then realized, hey, what's good for our clients is good for us as well, and started baking that into our, our internal communication relative to our training and competency program. So just, Yeah, I know we're talking here, so if I can, uh, describe what we mean by the inverse pyramid. At the bottom, just, it's a pyramid upside down. On the bottom, the tip is the small piece is communication. Communication can be just a one and done. I've communicated X to you, you've communicated Y to me. It can be a single point in time.

As an example, this would be there's some new law and, or new regulation and everybody needs to know about it. So it could be just send it out. Correct.

Correct. Yep. We've told you the regulations say we need to tell you X, Y, and Z. We're telling you X, Y, and Z. It can be a single moment in time. Maybe there's some back and forth, maybe there's some interaction, but it can be something as simple as regs say I have to communicate. We've communicated. Regs say I have to send this message to this organization. We have sent that message to that organization. So the communication is— can be looked at as potentially a one and done. Situation. It can be almost a check-the-box type exercise.

It doesn't necessarily matter if someone understood it or not, you just have to show that you did the thing. Correct.

You have been communicated to. Whether you absorb that communication, that's awareness. And so that's the next tier on the pyramid, is awareness. Yeah. So if somebody needs to be aware of the communication, it may be some degree of remedial action based off of that communication, that is only going to be accomplished with repetition. So awareness is built on repetition. So if we want somebody to have more than just communicated, check the box, that we want them to be able to have a baseline of knowledge with maybe some type of remedial action that's going to be built by repetition. So it might be multiple communication events, might be different types of communication. Maybe we say it first in an all-hands meeting and then maybe we follow it up at HRP. We have weekly communication, little flyers that go out to everybody on Monday and it's like, this is what you need to know for this week at HRP. And so we might have it in that. That also gets posted on Hike, our knowledge architecture platform. We might reiterate those in weekly team meetings that we have, and then we might post them on the next month's health and safety newsletter. So awareness is repetition. And normally, you know, it's— we might have a drive this month to communicate something and to drive that awareness. 3 months from now, we'll probably come back and circulate back on it because, again, awareness is just peat and repeat, peat and repeat, peat and repeat. And normally a lot of different styles, cuz some things are gonna hit some people and not others. So that's the second tier of our pyramid is awareness. The next tier of our pyramid is training. And with training, you're normally imparting some type of skill in, in the training piece. So that's gonna be more detailed than awareness. It's gonna be maybe a little bit more involved, a little bit more attention to detail. A little bit more structured. And then competency is the top of the pyramid, the widest part now. And that is demonstrated— Mm-hmm. —skill awareness and level. And that just builds over time. You're gonna get that from communication, from awareness, from training, from all the things. And I'll just give you, again, since I'm in the environmental health and safety field, I'll give you an example that we commonly see when we're working with our clients and our stakeholders. I'll give you an example of where I see this play out. Sometimes employers need to make sure that their employees are aware of the hazards of the chemicals that they work with. Mm-hmm. It's under the OSHA Hazard Communication Program, and that program requires training and information and all that type of stuff. But one of the elements of that program is that employees need to have access to what's called a safety data sheet. Mm-hmm. And the safety data sheet is a data sheet that is specific to a chemical that tells the user of that chemical what are the health hazards, what are the physical hazards, what are the personal protective equipment you need to use that. So, an example of where I've seen in a very practical way the breakdown from communication to awareness to competency jumping all the way to the top. Mm-hmm. Is we find that employers are really good about telling employees about safety data sheets. Hey, you need a safety data sheet, it's located on, you know, SharePoint. If you need safety data sheet, go to SharePoint. And I'll, in an audit, I'll interview employees. Hey, where do you get a safety data sheet? They're like, oh yeah, we got a SharePoint. So there's been that communication.

So you're validating that the awareness has happened? Correct.

So they are aware, yeah, that the Safety data sheet is on SharePoint. When I ask them to pull me up a safety data sheet of a chemical that they are using, they can't do it. So that's an example of where awareness still is not enough. They're aware it's on SharePoint, but they don't have the skills to access SharePoint. So there was a different level of training that maybe broke down, or they don't have the competency to actually access that safety data sheet. And they need to physically be able to access the safety data sheet. You know, that's an example of the awareness worked really, really well. But that training is then the skills that are further communicated with the members. Hey, this is how you access SharePoint. If you forget how to access SharePoint, this is the training video, you know, and, and more what we just see is people just freeze like, I know it's on SharePoint, I don't even, I can't even tell you how to get to SharePoint. So there's a, there's a competency that breaks down.

I'm using all my self-control to not make a, you know, like if it weren't SharePoint. No. Um, yes. Uh, that's, that's really good. And so going back to the bottom of the pyramid, so on the communication side, not necessarily kind of audited or followed up to make sure that worked, but it sounds like when you get to awareness, there is some like level of we want to do some sampling, or at least to see like, is that— is the awareness activity effective? And when you get to the training versus competence, is there a similar— like, do you kind of audit differently for training versus competence, or is competence the result of the training being successful?

I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going to go back a second. You mentioned earlier about, you know, I harp a lot on why are we doing the training. Training, I think, is an overused word, right? Like, why are we imparting information onto our stakeholders, right? Right? Like whether it's training, awareness, communication, whatever. Yeah. Why are we doing that and what do we hope to gain? Mm-hmm. And so really go back to what we learned in elementary school, right? The who, what, when, where, why, how. A training program, any type of education program, any part of that pyramid, we need to understand the who, what, when, where, why, how of that content. And if it is mission critical, if the skill, if the content, if the information, if it is mission critical, then there's gotta be a skill, there's gotta be a competency check. And that's gonna look different for different things, right? And I'll just give you an example that I apply in my role as practice leader. We have a quality management system. Mm-hmm. As I imagine many organizations do. And we do annual training in our quality management system. We do awareness campaigns throughout the year. Don't forget this, remember this. And we check competency by doing quality audits every year. What we find in our quality audits, any findings, we then look at what's the root cause of, you know, you know, why, why does this aspect keep getting missed, or this detail isn't quite where we want it to be. So we are gauging competency through auditing in that particular example, and then doing a root cause analysis.

But you're auditing the end product, you're not auditing did the person learn this. It's like, did it show up in the work?

We're auditing the process, the process, the process and the end product, correct. 'Cause hopefully by doing that, right, if we're auditing the process, if we see that something's not effective, we can go back and identify why is it not effective? Is our training not effective? Is our communication not effective? Are the processes too cumbersome? And we can, we can tweak and constantly evolve. So an audit is a great example of a competency check and just normal kind of quality assurance, quality controls in a business like us where we're, our product is our people, we are gauging competency throughout key milestone aspects of any particular project. So if we're reviewing a milestone of a project, and this is more, this would be training and education related to what we are actually doing on behalf of a client. So if we're seeing the report is not, is not forming the correct conclusions, then we can see, okay, whether it's the hands-on learning, whether it's the mentorship, whether whatever we've done to build that skill, build that development, build that knowledge, we're not done yet. You know, so in that milestone review, we then sit down with the person and instead of just giving them a red line bleeding document, sit down like, this is why I said this, this is why I did that. Do you have any questions there? And, you know, we have, we have in our quality program, a peer review aspect as well. So peers, so if an error makes it through a scope of work and it went through peer review and it gets to the manager review and there's that error, we then can sit down both with the preparer of that document and the person that peer reviewed because it went through two passes, two people. And we can make sure that folks learn it that way. And that's kind of embedding that mentorship. But again, it's that competency check. Competency check is baked in throughout, but it's at the top of the pyramid because That's your goal is to gain competency.

Right. But you're— it's interesting because I think a lot of times when I hear this, at least I can only speak for myself, I just kind of would assume the competency check is at the person. But you're really looking at did HRP learn this, right? Consistently. Like you're auditing the organization as a learning organization in a way. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's because again, that's, that's our innovation. In consulting, innovation is learning. If we were making a part, making a widget, making a what's-it, innovation would be in improving that widget, improving that what's-it, reducing the cost, reducing the waste, having something with more bells and whistles, right? But in what we do, innovation is in the individual, not in the product. And so that is only accomplished with learning and development. Are there—

I'm assuming there are also areas where you're not just doing competency checks on the org, you're actually looking, look, this person needs to learn this thing. We put them through training, we did whatever the thing is. Can they repeatedly do it? Correct. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And this— and this is— this is, again, that line between actual and aspirational. Sure. We are working toward a more defined and regimented checklist of that skill demonstration. It's been a little parochial to this point, meaning by office, by office, by individual, by team. Yeah. And we want to avoid the pot roast problem. And, and if you don't know what I mean by the pot roast problem, it's an old saying, story, whatever, of you've got a new married couple and—

oh, I know this. Okay, tell the story. I know the one you're getting at.

And I'm gonna say the husband is making the pot roast because my husband's a cook than I am. So the husband's making the pot roast and he takes the pot roast and he cuts an inch or two off one end and an inch or two off the other end and then cooks it. And after doing this for the first however many years of marriage, the wife is finally like, why do you always cut off? I mean, that's good meat. What are you doing cutting it off? And it's like, because that's how my mom always did it. And then calling the mom, well, that's because their pan was too small to fit a pot roast, so they always had to cut off the ends for it to be able to bake. So that's the problem with parochial training, right? There's going to be maybe bad habits that filter through, old habits that filter through, and it's not the best anymore. And so something that we are moving toward is a more defined checklist that is built off of what's called the EDGE method. And I can't take credit for the EDGE method. I first learned about the EDGE method when my son was in Scouts, but it's educate. So EDGE is an acronym: educate, demonstrate, guide, evaluate. And so in our skills competency checklist, there will be an education piece. And the education piece is what we would traditionally think of training, whether it's a recorded presentation or reviewing a standard operating procedure or whatever, but there will be the education piece and then there'll be the skills demonstration piece. And we will have— and this is where we're working toward— is these are the people that know this skill well enough to be the demonstrator so that we're not cutting off the ends of the pot roast, you know, but we are actually doing the best practice of the day and time in that skill. And so we'll have people that are certified demonstrators, if you will, educators, however we wanna call them, and they'll demonstrate the skill. And then they'll also, there'll be a series of, all right, you watch me do this. Okay, now I'm gonna watch you do this. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna stand back and see if you can do it without any of my assistance and kind of graduate up to that within an evaluation period, whatever the appropriate time period is later to make sure that bad habits have not crept in. They're still doing it the proper way. Yeah. And, and so the reason why I say this is kind of aspirational is because we're first identifying because it's difficult, right? Because in consulting, some of what we do is very skills-based. You've got to do a slug test that is very skills-based.

And then can you tell us just what a slug test is so we can have that in our, in our example that we can work through?

I don't know what a slug test is because that's in the environmental practice. Okay. But it is— it's used in groundwater sampling. Okay. I can send you a YouTube video.

That sounds great. I'd love that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's some kind of sampling of water to evaluate toxins or something like that.

It's, it's what my colleagues in our environmental discipline do. Absolutely. And it's fresh in my mind because we just did slug test training. Mm-hmm. Um, but I'll give you an example of how that works through the EDGE method. We have a video on how to do a slug test. And we can use that for our own people. And we can also use that for other stakeholders out there. It's on HRP's YouTube channel. Yep. And then, and then there's the skills demonstration piece. So there's the education videos, training, in-person training, whatever. And then there's the skills demonstration out in the field with, with a colleague.

Okay. So what, before you go out in the field, watch the thing. Correct.

Yeah. Correct. Yeah. If you've never done this before, then before you go out in the field and you're going to be working alongside this person or that person, watch this video first. Yeah. So that's going to be something that's very tangible, skills-based, right? You know how to do it or you don't know how to do it. It's very tactile with equipment and whatnot versus knowledge-based in the compliance world. In the world that I know something, I do know more information about in the compliance world, right? We are reading and understanding and applying regulations. Yeah, that's not something I can like show you. It's not very tactile. It is— we can read a regulation together, we can talk about what it means, but the way that it gets applied at a customer site, at an industry, at a business in a different state, in a different municipality, is all going to change based on the specific conditions of that client.

Correct. Okay. Correct. So then you can do case-based or simulations or something like that so they can apply it in different scenarios. Right, right.

So we can say, okay, well, you're using this product instead of this product. So it's much more— that's more of a knowledge base versus a skills base, if you will. And that approach is very different. It's going to be easy for us to do that that skills matrix, if you will, that skills checklist with the EDGE method. It's going to be a lot easier in some of our more tactile disciplines where we're out in the field and we're doing groundwater sampling or we're belling a well or we're doing this or we're doing that. That is going to be a lot easier to develop a training program around. It's going to be a lot more wiggly relative to regulation because you've got federal regulations, you've got state regulations, you've got even municipality regulations. So you've got to be able to kind of blend all of those and then look at the scenario of the client and apply them. Yeah. So it takes a lot more collaboration with your peers and your subject matter experts to understand all the nuances of application.

Yeah. And I think it's, I'm trying to put myself in the mindset or the position of the evaluator.. And so if I'm in the first example where I'm in the field watching somebody, like, I can see literally the movements that they're making. Correct. Whereas if I'm you, I can't see what's going on in some— somebody's head.

I can't see the wheels turning. Correct. Correct. Which is why in some of our practices, right? Like the compliance practice, our quality management system, our quality assurance and quality controls are critical to evaluating our, employee development and training.

Because you can't see, because you can't see into the process with that kind of granularity, you have to evaluate the outputs. That's, that's your way to do it.

But with the quality assurance and quality control, right, we have tools on the front end to lead and guide, and then we've got tools on the back end before it goes out to a client.

Yeah, that's interesting. One thing that you have said to me is that you think that— I've heard you say— is that you think training as a word gets a little overused. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think cuz we all have a preconceived notion of what training is. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and I think we think of training as sitting in the classroom, you know, and, or, or sitting in front of a, a self-guided online training or something. And if you just look up the Merriam-Webster or pick a dictionary definition of training, it's normally gonna speak to skills. The process of learning a skill you need to do a particular job. And I think it's just a catch-all when we're talking about imparting knowledge. And sometimes training of a skill is appropriate. Sometimes education is appropriate. And is education and training the same? I think it's used in a workplace setting. In a workplace setting, I think it's used. I think education and training is used interchangeably. Mm-hmm. But back to our skills demonstration, right? Training is really skills demonstration, you know, education, like my team, a better word, and I'll probably use training because it's just, it's baked into our vernacular, right? But education is really what builds our team in the compliance world. We have to educate them on the regs. We have to educate them on how to apply the regs. We have to have this series of hypothetical conversations. Well, what if this? Well, what if that? To truly educate the person to be a subject matter expert in a particular regulation or particular topic. And then some aspects will be very skills-based and training will be involved, especially when we're talking about where we're having to do calculations along certain lines. So yeah, I just, I think, you know, I think there's a couple of, and there are words that, that I've used already, so I'm, I'm I'm kind of, you know, ratting myself out here too, but communication I think is overused. Training is overused, which is why I think if we focus less on the words and more on the who, what, when, where, why, why, where, how, and develop a program around that.

I think what you're saying is because people hear different things when you use words like training and communication. Mm-hmm. And you, if you haven't articulated that that goal and like your hopes and dreams for what this thing will accomplish, then who knows what this thing's gonna— like, how would you know it's— if it's successful?

Correct, correct. And also, it's also important to recognize that training sometimes has a negative connotation when you're in a consulting type space. Um, a lot of times training is looked at as overhead, did you know? But it's really a vital— like I was saying, I mean, training it The imparting of knowledge, the imparting of knowledge and development and skills is how one innovates in a consulting arena, in a services arena, right? We're not gonna innovate a regulation, right? But we're gonna innovate on how we understand and apply the regulation. And we do that through the imparting of knowledge, the imparting of skills, the imparting of competencies. But in a lot of times, when you're in a space that sells hours. Yeah. There will be some individuals that will hear the word training and their mind will immediately go to overhead and unbillable hours. And just to—

let's just have 3 buckets of people. There could be firm leaders, there could be the project managers of projects, and then there's the kind of people working on the projects. Right. Who is worried about training in that scenario?

I think, I think you're going to have everybody. Everybody is worried about training in a different way. Right. If you're a team member, if you're more at the more entry level and the level where your learning curve is rapidly going up, you're going to be thinking about training as a vital part of your career growth. Right. And your knowledge and your competencies.

But you're not worried that about— are you worried about the billable piece of that for the team?

Correct. Correct. And then, yeah, I'm going to come back to that.

Okay.

Sure. If you're a project project manager. Yes. And if your metrics are on your time, on your team's billable charge rate, right, you might be hesitant on training because it's like, they need to know it, but if they have all this overhead, then that might look bad on you, the project manager, because your team's TU is low that particular month. If you are at that kind of managing director role where you're maybe responsible for staff development and competencies within a practice, right? You see it as vital. You see it as essential for the sustainability of that practice. And then if you're at the executive level, it depends. If you're the financial officer, right? You're gonna be again looking at billable rates and all that type of stuff. And there's, I think there's paradigm shifts that need to occur. Yeah. Sometimes. Training is not a four-letter word, and skills, education, whatever we want to call it, it's not bad. We just need to make sure that we're being smart about it. And what I mean by that is, again, I keep going back to your people is your product, right? And I started my career in industry, as I mentioned, and if you're in industry, right, you— there's, there's value-added costs and there's non-value-added costs, and it depends on if that cost is captured in what you're selling, right? So when I was in industry, I was an environmental engineer. What I did not go to the product at all. I was non-value-added relative to pricing that, that, that item, right? In, in consulting, we have to look at the cost of training as value-added. It goes directly into your product. And so I think it just takes some paradigm shifts within organizations. And I think— not saying that we've mastered it, but I would say we have made great strides in looking at that in a different direction. And we've done a couple of things over the last few years. If you are being trained in a skill, if you're being educated in a regulation, if you have any imparting of knowledge that is contributing to a project, you put that time onto the job that is benefiting from that skills.

So I've never done a slug report. I need to do one for this project.

I need to watch this 30-minute video and then I'm going to bill it to the project and I'm going to bill it to the project. And what's super important for any of the clients that are out there listening to this, what is super important is billing means it's assigned to your job. Us billing it to your job does not mean that cost actually goes to the client.

Doesn't mean it's going on the invoice.

That's correct. Correct. But we can't even make that determination if it's not going to the job. So we're capturing a more representative picture of what it truly cost us to do our work. Because if somebody is, if somebody is out on a job site and they're in that early phase of EDGE where they've gone through the education, they're now at the demonstration. So they're going out and they're shadowing somebody and they're going to probably be a little bit of hands-on toward the end. Like even if we budgeted that job as just one person out in the field and now all of a sudden we have two people out of the field, right? There was a time when we would say primary person, you bill it to the job, secondary person, you bill it to training. Which is overhead. Now we have them both bill it to the job, but the client still only sees that which was in our budget, right? That which was in our quote. But we see on the financial side the true cost of our business, right? The true cost of our project. We're not hiding things in overhead anymore. So that was one switch that we've made.

But that gives that— because like, that gives that person who would be the demonstrator and maybe they do it a little bit more slowly because they've got that person with them. Right. Because they're, you know, they, but they feel like they can do that because their project isn't getting quote unquote penalized for— Correct.

Nobody gets penalized in that situation. The project manager doesn't get penalized because they have a team member that has a lot of overhead that week or that month. The client doesn't get penalized by having to pay for two people where we said we were only gonna send one. Nobody gets penalized in that area. So it, one of the steps that we've tried to take to, to remove that stigma, right, from training.

Well, the other penalty could have been the team member doesn't— the other scenario is they don't get taken along because— correct, correct.

And then you don't have somebody that you need to do it, right? We're seeing some positive aspects of just that simple shift. And, and there very well could be any companies out there that's what they've always done, but that was a bit of a shift for us. And we documented it, we've standardized it, we've made it consistent, we've communicated it over and over and over again. So there's that awareness piece that everybody knows what to bill it to. And we're very intentional. If there is something to be billed to overhead that is not related to any type of project, then we'll say, bill this to the training overhead job number.

So we're— so just like general development for a person that's not for a specific project.

Correct. Exactly. Maybe we have a new procedure at HRP. And we need to train everybody into the new procedure. That's not going to one job, right? Yeah. So that would go to our training overhead. And then the other thing that we've done that I think is also really good, and this is a nuance in the consulting space, very commonly in consulting, an employee is only paid overtime if it's more than 40 hours billable in a week. So somebody could work a 45-hour week and maybe 39 of those hours were billable, 6 were not. The person is just going to get their standard paycheck, so to speak, for that week. We— below a manager level, so manager or higher, not the case. But at that critical piece where people are developing the skills, you get paid for every hour overtime. And that is because We have a lot of resources. We have a lot of— we have a lot of here is the water, all you need to do is drink resources out there. But we wanted people not to perceive being penalized for taking that drink. Right. And so why would somebody work a 48-hour week when they're not going to get paid for 8 of those hours? And we want people to take accountability and responsibility for their professional development and training. We've got tons of tools and tons of resources. And if somebody works an extra hour today because they're doing a project or they heard a colleague talking about a project that they're working on and they don't know that much about, and they want to go on to HIKE and go through that training module and learn more about it. Mm-hmm. And so that maybe the next time a project comes up, they can now raise their hand and be a part of it. We want to encourage that. Mm-hmm. So that was the other thing that we did to aid in removing the stigma of training is that our consulting teams, our staff get paid for every hour of overtime, not only if it's billable. That's great.

I mean, it feels like going back to our different stakeholders in this model where we've got a team member and a project lead and a managing director and executives. Sounds like what you're saying is we all agree that developing our people is important. Correct. But the old system just had different incentive structures for different members in that group.

Correct. Right. I like to use the false roadblocks. False roadblocks. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, we, we, why, why is this roadblock here? Let's remove it. Does that value add, add it at all? There's stigma, there's misperceptions, there's wrong incentive structures, whatever it is.

This may fall under the kind of aspirational versus actual spectrum somewhere. Right. But I want to just talk about competencies for a minute because it's something that I think bedevils a lot of firms is sounds great in theory, but in practice, like, how do you actually define competencies for different roles and where do you even start? And so to the extent you've gotten traction on this, I'd love to hear your process and experience.

It's difficult. I mean, I, you know, I wish I, I wish I could tell you we've got the secret sauce. I love to talking to other companies and organizations about, okay, so how do y'all gauge this? How do you do this? And we're, we work with technical people in what we do, and technical people like numbers, right? So where we can have measurable key performance indicators, we try to have measurable key performance indicators. But then there's that balance of, okay, is this a leading indicator or a lagging indicator? And time utilization is a perfect example. Okay. If somebody's TU was really low last week, well, there's absolutely nothing I can do about that. That is a lagging indicator. I can't go back and put more billable time. On their calendar for last week. It's done. That's a lagging indicator. Now, it could still be very informative, right? Maybe we, maybe our scheduling is not as detailed as we thought it was. I mean, there, there's definitely still things that we can glean from that lagging indicator. But it's, it's, it's that, it's a lagging indicator. But it can be helpful. And we're talking about these skills, right? This competency. 'Cause what if their TU was low because all the work we had last week, they couldn't do? Well, why couldn't they do it? And all right, well, how come we haven't trained that person on that? And, and so we have skill matrices. This person can do this, this person can do that. And it is a little subjective, and that's where engineers and scientists, we get really squirrely about it, right? Because it is subjective. But we do have skills matrices and we do know folks' performance indicators. You know, we, we, we're always trying to match the right person on the job based off of their skills and competencies. But then also, you know, where we can't use somebody on a job and that's the only person that's available, that is a lagging indicator that tells us we were not being proactive enough on the front end to build a deeper bench. So when this particular type of project that required this particular type of skill, that we had a full bench. You got exposed. I mean, yeah, yeah, right. And sometimes we're just busy all over the place. Sure. And I mean, we're, we're the next, you know, we're, we're training our children next. Sometimes it's just, we got, you know, it's just busy. Everybody's all over the place. But, but yeah, some, sometimes those lagging indicators can help inform where we need to build the skills and where we need to build the competencies. And do we have a good handle on defining those skills and competencies? Hmm. We have a handle. Is it the best handle? I don't know. That's something I'm always looking for. We've gone different directions. We've kind of gone the, how many years have you been doing this? Right. But sometimes it's maybe they've worked on one project like that a year for 5 years, but is that really 5 years of experience or 5 projects over 5 years. So we've looked at the number of years that somebody has done something. We've looked at the number of projects related to that. So we've played around with that.

But you're inferring competency in that through experience versus— Correct. Like in the slug test, you're not auditing it.

But as we go toward that skills, that onboarding skills matrix, that will be a more quantifiable, all right, this person can do this. But then it's not bulletproof, right? So at this moment in time, somebody can do the skill. They've gone through the process, they've gone through the checkoff, they've gone through all the sign-offs, they got it, right? Well, what if that person doesn't get assigned to a project that requires that skill for 4 years? Yep. Do we need to go back? Like, and that's That's, that's where the details get in the way, right?

We're, we're— So you almost kind of need like re, recertification to some, without turning it into a crazy bureaucracy, right? Correct. Yeah. Correct. Exactly.

And that, that's the piece we haven't really fleshed out yet. Baby steps. Step 1 is what are the skills that we're gonna develop this program around? Hmm. Step 2, develop the program for each of those skills. Hmm. And then step 3, implement it. Right. And then step 4 is going to be that maintaining piece. Right. And well, that's going to be step 4 from now.

Don't let step 4 get in the way of making progress on step 3.

Exactly. Exactly. So we're just trying to get caught trying right now as we, we work toward it.

So it's interesting. I mean, so many firms struggle with the skills like thing. I think I don't know if anyone's got it licked. If you do, please email us at smarter@knowledge-architecture.com. And tell us your secret. But there's also, there's an assessment challenge that you mentioned in terms of just because you can do it today doesn't mean you can do it 4 years from now. But I'm assuming there's another one that's like, it's easier to understand if someone is competent at doing a slug test versus giving and receiving feedback. That's more of a soft skill, right? Are you getting caught trying on your way up the hill? Are you trying to get— make progress by focusing on some of the ones that are easier to observe, or are you going after some of these harder ones too?

I would say we're doing all the above and we're going about them very differently. Okay. So there's the skills and competencies of the craft. We'll call it that, right? The craft. What we're doing for a client, we'll call that the craft. Yep. There's the skills and competencies of the, the craft. Can you do a slug test? Can you write an SPCC plan? Can you do this training for this client for this OSHA topic? Mm-hmm. There's the craft. And then there's what you speak to, which we always broadly say the soft skills. Yep. And that's the working with others, working within a team, meeting deadlines, meeting expectations. Setting expectation. We, we have this mantra: set expectations, meet expectations. If you identify a deviation, communicate that deviation, reset the expectation, and meet the new expectation, right? Things always come up, but you just gotta communicate that. So we developed, 2 years ago now, we developed an internal training platform. Not platform as in like a technical platform, but program, we'll say training program that we call the employee lifecycle. And it starts with onboarding and it goes all the way through exit. And it's relatively new, right? So we're shotgunning it out, but it includes those employees that are 0 to 1 years go through a training program called HRP 101. Mm-hmm. And it's a little bit about the basics of consulting. What is this business and industry you've gotten yourself into? What do we mean by billable time? What do we mean by communications? Why are deadlines important? Why are, why is that billable hour important? Welcome to the world of consulting. Welcome to HRP. Mm-hmm. And it's in only in person. We do not let people connect in remotely. Mm-hmm. It's in person at our corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Who does it? We do it internally. Who teaches it? I'm one of the teachers. Okay. So there's a team of us inside. Yeah. So kind of a diverse mix within. Mm-hmm. We've got about 5 people on that training committee. Yep. And so we divide and conquer and, and we, the, we get feedback from those that go through. What did you like? What did you not like? What did we spend too much time on? What did we not spend enough time on? And so we, it tweaks each year based off of that feedback as well as trends, what we're hearing from managers and things of that nature. So, the employee lifecycle goes from HRP 101 to HRP— we have a 401 in there, but we're shotgunning it, right? We're not rolling it all out at once. We initiated HRP 101 in 2024. We implemented HRP 201 last year, and 201 are those folks— it's not a hard rule, but roughly those that are maybe 3 to 5 years of experience, give or take. So they're, they're past that 101 level and maybe they're on the cusp of being promoted to, from an associate consultant to a consultant, or from a consultant to a senior consultant. Maybe they're on the, or the equivalent if they're a business support arm. So they're on the cusp of maybe getting some more responsibilities. So we have an HRP 201 program where we get a little bit more in detail. Where 101 is what is this world of consulting you've gotten yourself in? What does available time mean? Blah, blah, blah. 201 gets a little bit more into how the sausage is made. We walk through budgets, we walk through profit and loss. We talk about why, how we organize budgets. It's, it's a little bit more into the business. Yeah. And there's a little bit more career development there as well. We help them start to scratch out what their career path might look like. Mm-hmm. Because at that, what we learned is at that 101 level, they're still figuring things out. They, career path is not there yet. They might think they wanna know what their career path is, but they're still, they're still learning what's what. So it's a little, we've learned that was a little premature to jump right into the career path. So 101 introduction, 201, we get more involved in career paths. 301 is— we have not launched yet. 301 is for those team members that are about to go into a manager role, either newly into a manager role or about to go into a manager role. And we haven't launched that one yet, so that's just kind of ethereal at this point. And then we've got one kind of beyond that, which we're calling the Concierge Program, which is for our project managers specifically. Mm-hmm. And just needs that we see this year, we're launching the Concierge Program. Okay.

Why is it called a Concierge Program?

I have no idea. Okay. I did not name it, but I don't know. I was not involved in that brainstorming event. And I think it's because What is a concierge, right? A concierge is—

Get you things on demand that you need in that moment. So, correct. Correct.

And so for the managers, right, they need certain things at their fingertips. Yeah. And so instead of us having like an HRP concierge at the front desk that you can just go to, right, and, hey, I need this or I need that, it's more of a collective, if you will, of all of the managers. And we've got some specialized tools that we're working on, you know, Hike knowledge architecture platform is really crucial for this. So we've been building out some infrastructure on Hike. You know, Hike is kind of the concierge, I guess you could say. Yeah, but it's not so much a mentor program, but new managers will be placed with more developed managers. Right. And we do have very tangible metrics for our managers. So a new manager would be— would have a buddy that is a high-performing manager. So, so I'm getting a little wiggly with this right now because we're in this process right now. So, so we are, you know, that is our 2026 is to launch the concierge. It's kind of a community of practice plus—

correct— peer mentorship type thing. Correct. Yeah.

So apprenticeship, mentorship. Yeah.

Concierge. No, my, my godfather was a vascular surgeon and at a teaching hospital, and so he and I have talked about that a lot and how all that part worked and It sounds like it's like, look, I haven't done this procedure in a while. Could I get another person in here to consult or like get a second set of eyes on this? You know, right. Or some knowledge that can help me even if it's not a person. Yeah. Yeah.

I've got to have this difficult conversation with the client. Yeah. Hey, can— is there a manager that's been in a similar situation? Can we do some role-playing? We practice on this. So yeah, so we're developing that and we're just— we're growing at HRP. And so the launch of those different programs. And again, we're really kind of highlighting on the soft skills, the managerial skills, the teamwork skills, the working across team skills. We're really trying to highlight those soft skills through this program. And it is, it's just a little bit more weekly because you're talking about soft skills. But, but one of the things that's been critical since we've been developing this so far, it's got to be in person because You just, you've got to be able to know the people you work with, trust the people you work with.

These different programs are like a week, like how long are they?

Like a day or two. So they're kind of concentrated. Yeah, yeah.

But you want to build connection within these cohorts as part of the goal.

Exactly, exactly. We try to do them like the 101 class is right before our holiday party. And currently at HRP, if you work for HRP, you and your spouse can fly to Connecticut for a holiday party covered by HRP. So we have travel stipends so that everybody can participate regardless of what office they work in. So 101 is around the holiday party, so they get to kind of be immersed in several aspects of our culture all at once. We have the big annual meeting that also is at that same time. So there's the training, but then there's also the further integration into our structure and culture with our annual business plan meeting that everybody's involved in, and then the holiday party. Yeah. And the 201 is similarly around a couple of big activities that, that we have at HRP. So it just further enmeshes folks into our structures.

That makes me think, you know, we've been having one of the big conversations in our LMS beta is just because you can make it digital doesn't mean that you should, and trying to navigate when to do which. And this one sounds like— I'm just inferring that like the goal of 101 is more about that culture immersion and connection than it is the actual literal knowledge transfer that happens within those sessions, right?

100% correct. Yes. And you're right, there is definitely a place for the digital aspect. And that comes back to the know the what training, why are you doing it, do the whole who, what, when, where, why, where, how. And if the digital platform makes sense, based off of all of those considerations, it's great. And again, we're part of the beta of your LMS, and that is going to aid in so many of our trainings where it's just, it's that education piece. Mm-hmm. It's building the awareness, it's tracking who actually has done it. It, it, it very much is scratching an itch for several of our topics, but it's not gonna be appropriate for all of our topics.

Absolutely. 100%. I would even think that there are some things in the 101 and the 201 that maybe you cover in person. Again, the goal is not the kind of competence. The goal is the connection. But maybe they need it 6 months later. And from a recall perspective, it makes sense to also have it available digitally, you know? Correct. Correct. Yep. You kind of started by talking about the two hats you wear, the kind of the internal focus and the external focus. And how does that— like, what does it feel like to be pulled between those two areas? Like, what are the challenges of really thinking about developing people while you're also serving clients? And how do you navigate that, the tensions?

Yeah, I mean, I would say it's a healthy tension, not an unhealthy tension. Okay. Because if there wasn't an aspect of my job where I was still interacting with clients, how would I know how to develop our people to better interact with the clients? Yep.

If you're not up on the mountain anymore, how do you know how to—

Yeah. Right, right. And, and there's a reason why in the A&E industry we call it practice, right? Mm-hmm. Because it's always evolving. And the issues that were front and central in our clients' minds when I entered consulting almost 20 years ago are very different from the issues that are front and center in our clients' minds today. Mm-hmm. And if I didn't dance on both sides of the line, I think it would be very difficult to do the job. I think where the tension can become unhealthy versus healthy is— and I'm sure every company struggles with this, right? I try to highlight— many of us do here in the company, we try to highlight— only work on something that only you can do. If you are working on something that you can push down to team members for them to get more experience, and for them to be able to sharpen those skills, push it down. If you are working on something that somebody else in the organization can do, then you really have to ask yourself, are you being a good steward of the company's time? Man. And, and oh my God, that is the hardest thing. And I'm telling you, I bomb at it sometimes. I mean, it just, it's human nature, right? You focus on what needs to be done. You don't focus on Should I be the one doing this? Yeah. Yeah. And so it is, that's where the tension becomes unhealthy is when you're letting the client side drive your task as opposed to remembering, yes, I'm here to serve the client. Right. And am I the right person to serve this client or do I need to push it down and somebody that's more in the practice than I am, right? Is there gonna be somebody that's gonna be better for this job? Is there gonna be somebody that's gonna be better for this job? Not only because of the client, but also because of the organization. Because it's not important that I know how to do this. It's important that our team knows how to do this. And sometimes it just, you, you just get so busy that momentum takes over or inertia, whatever takes over and you just gotta stop it and you've gotta push down. As much as you possibly can. And that is an integral part of anybody's training program is to push down work. Don't push up work. Yep. We really don't need to develop the folks that are already in the leadership chairs. We need to hone skills, right? But we need to be thinking of succession planning. We need to always be thinking of who's the next person that's gonna go into that project management role, or who's the next person that's going to go into that practice leader role, or who's the next person that's going to go into X role, and if you look around and there is nobody there, then that's not an indication that your staff isn't good. It's an indication that you've not developed your staff. And so that only happens by pushing down work. And so that, that's where the tension becomes negative, I think. Yeah. Is when you just get focused in the task and not the goal. I just interviewed for the podcast.

You're going to be episode 10. For episode 9, it's Kent Jonanson, who's part of the Leadership Pipeline Institute, and they have two books. They have The Leadership Pipeline and The Specialist Pipeline, and I really highly recommend both. And the thing that he was talking about that you just kind of touched on is, you know, when you move from leading yourself to leading others to leading leaders, like they've got a whole like series of turns you need to take in your career. Most companies don't talk about the loss and how much that job is going to change and that you got so much, you got kudos, you got feedback, you got more pay because you got really good at doing this thing. Now in this new job, you have to start almost from scratch again because that's not your job anymore. Your job is to get other people good at doing that thing.

Correct. It's a disease of taking your last job with you as you go up. And yeah, you've got to Do the job you have or do the job you want, not the job you had. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

As we get kind of toward the end here, I'm curious for your— you've hinted at some of it, but like hopes and dreams for learning and development at HRP. Like we're talking in 2 or 3 years and you've had a great run. What's different?

Ooh, magic wand moment. I would love to see that skills development program in action. We, we've identified across all of our practices and disciplines, whether it's business support or it's technical, have a fully fleshed out, you're entering this role, these are the 5 things you've gotta be able to do in the first year. And then be looking at, these are the 7 things you gotta be able to do in the subsequent years. And that is, we've got that rolling, we've got the certified trainers, it's evolving, it's growing.

And you have a system for, you, you can keep track of it too, right? Correct. Right.

And some type of system to keep track of it.

That's something you've told me is like to keeping track of all that is just so challenging. Yeah.

Correct. Correct. And because I think once we have that, we have, we have a good handle. We're, we're still at the size where we know who has what skills and competencies.

Like how many people in your practice?

Um, my practice, we have roughly 25 people. Right. So pretty easy to keep a handle on. And company-wide, we're 135, 140, and that's technical and business support. So even at those numbers, we have a good handle on, on everybody. But we're growing. Yeah, right. And there's going to be a point where it's not sustainable for us just to— oh yeah, well, I know so-and-so, you know, is is we've got to have the infrastructure in place for developing that structured check-off process and documentation, because at some point we're going to need to be able to pull up a database and see. We might remember 2 of the 7 people that have the skills off the top of our head, but we need that visual. It's like, oh yeah, so-and-so can do it as well. So I envision pulling up on Hike or whatever the platform. Yep. The skills matrix. We have this job in this location that requires this many people. Let's pull it up. Okay, we've got these 7 people. Yeah. That we can send out there. We have these 3 people that are still building their competency. Mm-hmm. Let's merge this person and this person for the project so we can then build that person up. And it's gonna be, yeah. Just a lot less subjective because it's going to be there in front of us versus going off of like just what's in people's heads and trying to do their best. Yeah, correct. Or we're sending this person out because they're in that office, whether they're the right person or not, they're in that office. And so looking into the future, a magic wand moment, I would love— I would love for that to be our reality. And also from a business continuity standpoint and from a sustainable operations standpoint, That's also going to highlight where our weaknesses are. It's going to highlight where we have a thin bench. It's gonna— it's, wow, we've got one person that can do this. Yeah. And all right, we, we need to— and if it's a, if it's a mission-critical task, then we'll be able to very easily and visibly see and be able to share with our leadership, hey, this is a mission-critical task, we only have one person that can do this, we need to invest in maybe some outside training. And then we are looking at some overhead, right? So we're looking at some cost. But when you have it all there, then it supports that decision-making process and helps us identify risk, helps us identify opportunities, and helps us form a more sustainable organization.

Yeah, I just circle back all the way to the beginning where you're saying the people are the product and the learning is the innovation. And the scenario you just described is a form of product management. You're able to say like, this is where we— you're able to visualize it and you can see like, these are our strengths and weaknesses, really not what people are kind of all carrying around in their heads. Right. Yeah. And then make according investments. That's great. I love that. Jackie, thank you so much for coming on and spending time with me. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is really, really interesting and I'm looking forward to being alongside and watching this journey evolve at HRP. Yeah, great.

Well, y'all are a part of the journey for sure. So Yeah, we're really excited about the LMS and using that to help us get to that next level. Amazing.

All right. Thank you. Yep. Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, you can subscribe for new episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, really anywhere you get your podcasts. And if you've got comments, feedback, or ideas for future shows or guests, you can email us at smarter@knowledge-architecture.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.

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