Why AEC Firms Are Evolving Beyond the Hour Long Lunch and Learn

we've seen some really interesting changes is in like the kind of the canonical unit of training in an AEC firm is generally the hour-long lunch and learn. And right. That is, that is the, that is the baseline. And those things get recorded, you know, and then kind of like somebody can go watch it later, right? This is the whole idea. And maybe it's for credit, maybe because they missed it, but—

but we know nobody watches it.

Right. And unless they can get a learning credit, like they, yeah. Yeah. So. Nobody watches them, or the part of the reason that they're challenging. Well, there's multiple things here. One, did that thing actually need to be an hour in the first place? Like we just kind of settled that an hour is a good time, maybe partly driven by our licensure authorities like that have told us an hour is the right time. So you have to work upstream a little bit, but if you can, but not everything has to be an hour and, and like, can you create on-demand native content that's 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Can you step people into a topic through a variety of levels? Because sometimes all somebody needs is awareness. They need to know that like, this is a thing that can happen, a thing that can go wrong, a piece of software we have, and you can just stop there. And when they need to go deeper, they can go to level 2 or level 3 or level 4 or however deep down the rabbit hole they need to go. So I think this kind of idea of the way that what good looks like for learning is changing. I think we've grown up now, all of us with TikTok and Google and YouTube, we're used to getting what we need and maybe that's really short. Maybe that's a 4-hour podcast, you know what I mean? Like people's attention spans are there for these like really long deep dives. But as a consumer, especially with AI, I can find what I need. I can decide if I just need a quick answer or if I need the deep dive and I can kind of like go go down the learning path I need to, versus everyone's getting an hour, you know, on Wednesday, February 25th, whether you need it now or not, because that's the most efficient thing for the system. And so we're shifting from that, I think, that what's most efficient for the old kind of traditional learning system to a more modern take on learning organizations, which is a mix of on-demand resources. Sure, still some in-person stuff or hybrid where it's like a short on-demand thing paired with a Q&A. With an expert, like just really experimenting with better ways to deliver the knowledge. And of course, with AI search, now you can ask a question and maybe you've just— all you needed was minute 45 of that thing that was in that training, and it brings that to you. You solve your problem and you move on. So even the learning content, you don't necessarily need to consume it all to achieve whatever the goal is that you have as a, as a seeker.