Why AEC Firms Need to Become Modern Learning Organizations

So Chris, I thought it'd be good to start with just like, what is a modern learning organization? Like, what is this pipeline thing?

Yeah, so I think maybe it's good to kind of pull back a little bit. We have been observing that there are some challenges and opportunities that, that our clients in AEC are facing. On the challenges side, we see obviously baby boomers retiring. We see really fast-paced change in terms of knowledge. So the half-life of knowledge is shrinking. There's new technology, new standards, new materials, new codes. Your clients are expecting you to do more with less. And we've got this kind of emerging generation, whether it's millennials and kind of Gen Z, who are really ambitious and want to kind of advance their career and Also, there's all this new technology. So AI has hit in a major way, and there are all changes to video technology too that we've been seeing. So it's easier to capture video and edit video and clip it out and use that as a knowledge sharing technology. And so this confluence of some of these structural, cultural demographic changes, as well as the technology changes, have really created this perfect storm, but kind of in a good way to really level up the way that AEC firms are doing learning and development. So there's an opportunity to deliver the right knowledge to the right person in the flow of work, much more than there ever has been. And what's exciting about that is partly due to all that change and also the retirement slash new generation coming up, there's this desire to upskill people more quickly, to take on more responsibility earlier in their careers than they ever have. That's a career ambition. For people coming up, but that's also a business reality for firms because there aren't enough of my generation. I'm a Gen Xer. There weren't as many of us born as there are boomers and millennials and Gen Zs. And then a lot of us left the industry after the dot-com bust and then after the housing crisis. So there's this hole of 15 to 25 years of experienced professionals that AEC firms are needing to figure out how to work with. And so They have to do it, and then the technologies have converged to make that possible. And so what we have built is a technology platform that combines intranet, learning management, AI search, knowledge agents, really advanced use of video technology to help enable this kind of change. That's a modern learning organization platform. But in order to take advantage of that new technology, what we're seeing is that firms have to change some of their processes and their culture and the way that they're just operating in order to take advantage of all of this new technology and to meet the moment. So I've been calling that modern learning organizations for about a year. We have been in various betas with these new technologies, like our learning management system. Susan, you know, you've been there with me since the beginning. At the end of last June, we're working with 56 firms adopting Synthesis LMS. But most of what we're seeing is that firms are working on the people process culture stuff more than the technology piece. In order to deliver high-quality on-demand learning, in order to get the kind of coverage on the topics that are important to us so we can upskill people, they're needing to change their approach to learning and development and their approach to knowledge management. And so that, that's at a high level what I see firms doing. And so as a modern learning organization, they will create and maintain collective intelligence. They will leverage technology to distribute the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. And this will make them more adaptable and more resilient as business conditions and practice conditions continue to change. So that's the high-level overview of what we're seeing.