In this interview, a long‑time Revit specialist (14 years at the firm) reflects on the firm’s early approach to BIM training—full‑day, one‑off sessions that gathered many users in a room to cover a topic that many would not use immediately. The specialist describes the frustration of repeatedly fielding the same questions months later, realizing that the information never truly stuck. From this experience, several lessons emerged: learning must be iterative and tied to immediate practice; cramming large amounts of material in a single day is ineffective; session length needs to be shortened, but even one‑hour lectures can feel too long for virtual delivery. Over time the firm shifted toward shorter, more frequent, hands‑on micro‑learning experiences that respect different learning styles and aim to deliver knowledge at the point of need. The conversation highlights how repeated failure prompted a redesign of training strategy to improve retention and adoption of Revit tools.
Chapters
I've been here about 14 years and I started as a Revit specialist. So I think back to when I started and the firm was pretty early on in its adoption of Revit and we were just focused on getting Revit out there to people. And, and even when I think about how we did that, you know, full days of training or getting everybody from a particular market or studio into a room together and teaching them about a topic. That they may or may not use. They need it for Revit, but they may not use it right away. So that's what training looked like a lot, just like getting a bunch of people together and picking a topic that seemed like people should know at some point. Mm-hmm.
And I mean, okay, obvious question, that didn't work.
It didn't work. No. So when I mentioned being in a role where I, I love documenting and sharing best practices and Over time, you realize that, you know, some things didn't work. You thought you delivered the message clearly. You thought you had the right people in the room, and then you get the same questions a couple months later from those people that you knew were in the room. And when that happens, there's moments of frustration. You kind of go through like, was it me? Did I not say it clearly? Did I go on too many tangents? Was it them? Were they not paying attention? They were there. I saw them there. This was like, not in a time where there was people joining virtually and they weren't multitasking on another project. And even people that were engaged during training, they were there, they were talking with me through it, they were asking questions. And that frustration of revisiting the topic that you thought just put in, you put that in their head, didn't happen. So that frustration leads to growth and changing how you do things and really examining What worked and what didn't, why didn't that work? And I feel like I'm thinking about that all the time, every year for 14 years, I've been wondering. It's like one of my life's missions to just figure out how to get information into those heads at the right time.
Okay. Well, what have you learned then?
So I've learned that A, learning about a topic that you're not gonna use right away, and I mean right away, like, in the next few hours or that week is not very helpful unless you engage with it a decent amount to get some of it in your head. And you're not gonna learn it thoroughly. You need some iteration. You need to go back and forth. You need to learn it, do it, learn a little bit more, do it, revisit. That's one thing. Another is trying to cram too much into like a whole day. You know, we tried to take advantage of All right, somebody just started. Let's, you know, give it all to them right away before they get busy on projects. And we'll just tell them everything they need to know right now, and then they'll just know it and they'll be off to the races. Yeah.
My window is closing to get to this person. I'm going to get them as many things as I can before they disappear.
Not, not good.
Doesn't work. Yeah.
Long, right at this point, like I talked about social media. And how people look for information, sending a message in a very long format. And I mean long, like even what we were used to, I, I was talking full days. So we shortened over time to hour-long sessions and that combined with the pandemic and being virtual and not wanting to do full days on Zoom or Teams or something, but, you know, we crammed into a 1-hour And now 1 hour feels too long.
1 hour of lecture feels too long.
Yes, 1 hour of lecture, 1 hour of talking at talking heads, talking at people.
You know, I think for me, I've been a school architect my whole career, so I learn a lot from teachers about how students learn. And so it's really funny to me that these light bulbs didn't go off 20 years ago, maybe about how we should reach the architects and engineers in our firm because we know that some people learn by doing, hands-on learners. Most people, right, are hands-on learners. But we also have those people that absorb. They need to go back, they need to revisit, they need to ask questions and come back and revisit. We have graphic learners. A funny story in this firm, I've had us adopt a whole new platform for our project management. That has a much more graphic interface on it because the architects weren't absorbing the spreadsheets. The engineers were, quite frankly, but the architects weren't. But suddenly we have a dashboard and Christina's been working towards a more dashboard-oriented thing for us. So I think it's the combination of all the things Christina talked about, but also the recognition that our people just learn differently and some will need to go back multiple times to that one piece of the video because it isn't sinking in, or go back to the exercises and the answers in order to be able to remind themselves how they got there. And I think that's an important recognition.
