In this planning session, Christopher Parsons and team members discuss how to improve learning and development within an AEC firm by creating short, reusable training modules—particularly a "cartooning" course—that become a trusted, ubiquitous resource. They emphasize the need for project managers and principals to easily reference the learning management system (LMS) as a clear table of contents, allowing anyone to point colleagues to the right video without re‑creating content. The conversation covers practical steps: packaging existing material for reuse across offices (e.g., Carrie’s integration work in San Diego), empowering knowledgeable staff like Kerry to facilitate workshops, and repurposing long‑form recordings into bite‑size, exercise‑enhanced chunks. The goal is to embed these resources into everyday workflow so that saying “go watch the video” becomes a natural, reliable response, thereby scaling quality and consistency across the firm.
Chapters
A part of me hopes that we'll get to a point where everybody knows about this message that we've recorded and they don't have to necessarily watch it ahead of time to let us let them know that it's there because it's just widely known that we have a way of cartooning and everybody refers to it. So when you're going to work on cartooning, it's, we know, and we trust that somebody's going to say, hey, go, go watch this thing. There's a video about it.
Back to the very beginning about consistency, right? When Laura was, we kind of talked about people like project managers aren't necessarily teaching people off, off book a little bit 'cause they're malicious. It's because they don't have a better tool. And so now that project manager can just point them to that course and let them know it's there and say, this is, this is how we do it.
And we want it to be ubiquitous, right? We want enough people to have been in the 1-hour training or the follow-up DTs or in the learning management system. So that it comes naturally out of anybody's mouth, "Oh, you should just go watch the video on this. We've got that covered. Go watch this," rather than saying, "Do we have any resources on X, Y, or Z?" And if it's ubiquitous and people are talking about it sort of as a base assumption, I think we'd be very happy about where we've reached as a learning organization.
And we already have one person, Carrie, Laura, that you mentioned. He's an engineer. He's going to go down to our San Diego office to help integrate some of them to our Linoakes Way, and he's going to reuse that cartooning course so he doesn't have to develop more content. It's already packaged for him. So it's a way for other experienced individuals to deliver the message without preparing the message themselves.
Kerry knows enough about cartooning that he can kind of facilitate the workshop, the, the kind of exercise part.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's really interesting. One of the things that I heard, there's a principal in one of our clients who's leading learning and development also, and he thought one of the most important things that they would achieve would be for the principals and the project managers in the firm to understand all the contents of the learning management system and what's available. So that when they see something on their project, they don't have to know exactly how to do everything, but they understand the table of contents essentially, right? And they can say, yep, we have something, go watch this, then we can talk about it.
Yeah.
And I think the fact that it's not go watch this 1-hour recording, that it feels so accessible. And you know that when you send someone somewhere else, you're sending them to a good place. You're not sending them to this misery of rewatching a recording from 4 years ago that where they weren't a part of it and they have to sift through and skip, you know, over some parts. I think that they, they'll be able to feel good about what they're sending people to, both in the message and in the format. We had a consultant come in and, and talk about, you know, like coordinating with consultants at a studio meeting. And I know it was recorded and I just, now it, you you want it to be in this new format so badly. I've tried in boot camp because all the past sessions have been recorded in those 1 to 2 hour long segments, and I've tried to repurpose those and it just is not, it's not as good. So I hope that we'll be able to do a little bit of a hybrid. You know, I can't ask all consultants that come in to pre-record videos for us. Maybe one day, but But maybe you can break some of them down. We'll learn how we could break it into chunks. And then I was thinking that we could have one of our team members record an intro video to this, like, hey, you know, this was recorded previous time, but listen out for this message. I feel like it's really important what they said there. And, you know, break it up into some sort of fashion, add an exercise to it so we can still reuse some of those. But I think we feel so good about the format, the short format that we would want to repurpose those long. Our recordings.
And learning and development's become more of a language, right? Because we talk about it at all our principal meetings and our market management meetings and in the studio meetings. So that it's really important to me that our content on there is reliable. So when we do get people to understand what's all available there, that they aren't then finding those things that are aging or no good anymore or just don't feel right. So that learning and development coordinator position is going to be important. Obviously, what Christina's leading on knowledge management is just to be sure that content is good so that when you are sending people there, it's reliable.
