Inside BWBR’s Landmark Learning Program 200 Sessions of AEC Knowledge Sharing

I want to start with Landmark Learning, which has been really an interesting program, Dan, that you and your colleague Steph Trispas. Shout out Steph shared at K Connect 2017 I think it was and it's been something that has stuck with anybody that saw that talk. It's been referenced a lot in our community and I think just for people who don't know about it. Can you kind of go back to the beginning and tell us about Landmark Learning, what it is, how it got started, what it is today?

Yeah, well, it's really our program for bringing in and working with emerging professionals to really kind of teach them up and get them further along in their career faster as we go along. So the landmark learning session kind of was born out of a necessity to take a five year architect and make them a ten year architect quicker. How do you do that? You know, so the first thing you do is you really need to get buy in from leadership and then once you get that support, then just go. So over time we have really evolved the Landmark Learning session into a number of different things, but its core thing is always the teaching of the architectonics, teaching of how to put a building together, teaching of how to work with clients and consultants and all of those, those things that often take years and years of experience to do. We want to bring in the experts and the nextperts to teach the people to do those sooner, quicker in their career and really get them to a point where they're comfortable doing it.

And so that's the target audience is five years or do you go even earlier than that in terms of experience?

We do emerging professionals all the way out to about five, six years in the career. But we also use it for people who join bwbr. You might be five years along in your career, maybe you're six, seven, eight years along in your career. But we still ask you to be within the Landmark Learning group because there's a lot of times that we talk about processes that we have at bwbr. We talk about how to coordinate with your specification writer, we talk about handing your project off to the construction administrator, what our quality assurance process is and what our expectations of you are as you're working on projects. So it's a larger group, but, but we do try to catch as many people as possible. Maybe a person who's been in their career for like eight years doesn't need to stay in there as long, but we do have a requirement, if you are five years or less in your career, you have to go to and Watch a certain amount of videos per year.

So this is new to bwbr. New to the industry is kind of who we're talking about. Give me a sense of this. Is this something that happens weekly? Is this monthly? How many sessions per year? How many people in each session, how much of it's live versus you kind of mentioned video, how much of it's kind of on demand? How does that work out?

Sure. So we do about 18 a year, 16 to 18 a year, depending on schedules, and weirdly enough, sometimes even where the holidays land. Right. But we do 16 to 18 a year now. We started with 22. We scaled back to about 16 to 18. Mostly because we have a lot of recording recorded content now they're all live. We do them via Zoom. We've asked if everybody wanted to go back to the live version. And from my own standpoint, I actually want to keep it in Zoom because we capture a much larger audience in person. We were getting about 22 to 24 people via Zoom. We're anywhere from 40 to 50 people during a session. So it's easier for people to access, it's easier for them to join in. So that's where we are right now. The recording aspect is we record every session and then we post it to our intranet site in case there's any interested parties out there that are not in the group but still might be interested in watching the video so that they have access to it as well. And it also helps the people who have been here for a while. Maybe they're. Maybe they feel like the Landmark group is exclusionary, but this allows them to participate or be able to learn some of the items that maybe they didn't know as well.

We even had to go through an exercise where the group. The invite list was getting a bit too big. And this was just in the last year, had to cull it down. People sort of graduated out of it. But you still had several people reaching out, asking to stay on the list.

So what's the if now that it's virtual? What's the downside of having the list be too big?

So if you are on the list, you are allowed a certain amount of hours per year to watch videos. Any back video that you want to.

Watch, put it on your time card.

And put it on your time card. Right. So we give everybody 24 hours to watch video or go to Landmark sessions. We feel that that is adequate. But, you know, when Carrie says we had to pare down the list a little, Chris, we had like 160 people on it, once you got on, you never got off. So we started thinking, is that even right? I mean, remember we've been doing this for 10 years. So some of the people in the original group were still on there and they're project managers now. They're not coming to them. So when you look at it and you say this person's moving towards being a principal, this person is working as project manager, maybe this person zigged in their career and they're writing specifications now. These are people that I want, they're more of the experts that I want teaching the course, not as much just coming to them. So we went through and started culling down the list a little bit. But Kerry's right, there were some people who were, even though they're project managers, they were upset about being taken off the list. So we.

Because they lost their ability to build those specific learning hours?

No, not so much. They just, they wanted to come to the session. You only get the invite if you're on the list. Got it. So when we let everybody know what we were going to, what we were doing, we didn't just drop people off the list, but we let them know that we were going to be taking people off the list. If you were one of those people, I sent everyone an email and saying, hey, just so you know, you're going to, going to be on the list anymore. There is an appeal process if you would like to send an appeal to remain on there. And we did get like 12 or 15 people, I think that appealed it and wanted to stay on. So we let, we were, we just went, let's just keep them all.

I mean, that's interesting to me. It speaks to the fact that you're creating value or else they wouldn't have tried to stay on the list. And it's interesting to me that, you know, you could be further along in your career. Like you said, you kind of got a more a technical track or project management track. And yet you're still going to stuff about door schedules and qa, QC and codes. Have you talked to them? I'm curious. They feel like I've got some holes in my knowledge and I just want to, you know, keep making sure that I'm continuously learning. What do you think the motivation is for keeping going to these intro level sessions?

I'll use an example. Susan Goldberg is one of the people who wanted to remain on the list. And Susan is a very accomplished project manager. She's really good at her job. Teams love working with her. But there are things that we talk about now, things like soft skills, how to deal with difficult people on your team or difficult people out in the field. And when she sent in her appeal, she said, some of the stuff I don't go to, but the ones that I want to go to, I always learn something in them. And I think that that's very valuable to me in my career. Plus, on top of that, she also wanted to hear what her teams were hearing. And I think I even mentioned this in 2017. Oftentimes the teams will come to the project manager and say, well, in the landmark session we learned, and they're like, oh, I didn't know that was a standard. So. So it helps them keep up with the standards as well.

And I will say, from attending these without fail, there's always some great anecdotes from Dan. So you get like the rich storytelling. And those more experienced people like Susan, oftentimes they will chime in with a real world experience or anecdote of their own just to kind of like pile in and say, like, here's a slightly different take on this or what I've seen. And I think that's super valuable. There's always some sort of discussion or questions, interjections that I think add value to it, make it a much richer experience, and why people like to attend it live.

Is there a market there that you're missing for Susan now? And people like Susan who don't want all of the things, but some of the things. Do you think there's like another program or like a more elevated version? I'm curious how you've responded to that.

I have some ideas. Dan. We didn't talk about this, but I had a conversation.

We should talk about it now.

Just earlier today about like, the landmark is sort of targeted at a specific cohort, but the topics span a variety. And I just had this conversation earlier that there's sort of three different tracks. There's like the technical in terms of technology skills, there's the role specific technical skills, and then there's soft skills. And which audience needs those tends to change. But we're trying to lean more into softer skills. We're finding that with AI and searchability and stuff is so much easier to find. How do I do this technical thing in Revit, it's easier to find that stuff. And I feel like from what I've seen in emerging professionals, they need a lot more coaching on the software skills. How to just call up somebody on the phone and ask a question, how to be more direct with people and Build relationships and things like that. So I think with the content shifting more towards stuff that's applicable to a broader audience, it's got wider appeal. That's my 2 cents.

Yeah. I mean, this year we did a lot of soft skills. Carrie came in and did a fantastic session on difficult conversations. And when we got through that one, I watched it, I was part of it at the end, and I thought, this is going to be perfect. We should do this for the project managers. So we took it into the project management group, and we did it in there. So we're trying to take the ones that might have more mass appeal and trying to tailor those into some of the other groups as well. Because it's not just. It's not just one group that should hear it. It should be a lot of other groups. So the ones that do have a crossover market, I guess that you would say, if we're in radio land, the ones that have a crossover market, we're trying to bring those forward and do them again with a smaller group. Sometimes they're shorter, you know, sometimes we expand upon them. But either way, especially in the soft skills, it's something that everybody can work on.

Yeah. What was nice about that one in particular is we tailored the examples of what difficult conversations might look like for an emerging professional versus a project manager. So it was kind of nice to be able to take it on a little road show to a different audience and make the content match what they needed.

Yeah, that's great. I wanted to ask you about this. So it used to be 22, and then it became 16 a year. And one of the things you said, Dan, was one of the reasons we felt we could do less is that we have such a rich library of recorded sessions. I'm curious about that. If you're somebody going through the landmark program, and as an aside, I think it's called landmark learning because that's the room where they used to be taught. Is that true? Okay. Just in case people are wondering if I'm part of this group, I'm on the list for 20, 26. I'm going to have 16 live sessions. Is that curriculum that goes into the video is that you can also go watch more if you want, with your time, or you're like, you're going to go to 16 live sessions. And then you should also definitely see these four. These seven. Is that kind of like a hybrid curriculum? I think is where I'm trying to get at.

I would say it's more of a hybrid curriculum. We do record the sessions there isn't follow on stuff as much as there is follow on on our Beehive site, where we say, hey, we have a video, we're going to post it, and then anybody within the firm can watch it off of that link. But curated wise, the videos that we have, I mean, Chris, like I said before, we've been doing this for 10 years. This year I'm going to hit 200 episodes. So I was joking around one time that don't I get syndication rates after a hundred?