Why Now Is the Time for AEC Firms to Redesign Their Learning and Development Programs

So Chris, you recently wrote the Smarter by Design issue on leveling up as a learning organization, and I'd love to know what feels so different and timely about that conversation right now in the AEC industry.

Yeah, so the background of this, for folks in our community who don't know, we've been running a private beta of our Synthesis LMS, you know, since late June, early July, and we're in 3 cohorts now. And one of the things that's been really interesting in those betas is that the conversation has been 20% about technology. And it's been 80% about learning strategy, philosophy, process, team structure, like all that non-technology stuff. That's been the majority of the conversations. And what most of the firms in the beta have kind of, they've all been doing learning and development. Like you can't be an AEC firm and have evolved longer than 5 years and grown and added people without being a learning organization of some sort. So as you bring new people on, they have to learn to do their work. And as people move to new levels or you take on new building types, like all that stuff happens. But what I think is true for most firms is that they were doing knowledge sharing, lots of lunch and learns or informal mentoring, learning on the project, which are all great things. Firms should continue doing that. But what I think that the LMS unlocked for them was a broader picture. It's like, well, we're not really doing systematic knowledge transfer. We're not understanding a system of how people learn the way that we do things in our company. If they want to become a project manager, do we have a systematic way of helping them go through that journey? If they want to start working on retail projects, as they worked on commercial projects, do we We know how to do that. So it's raised all these questions about can we be more intentional? Can we do it more by design rather than being kind of serendipitous? So much learning and development is, at least according to the folks in, in our kind of cohorts, was X person is interested in this topic and they're available next Thursday, so they'd love to talk about it. And so it's a lot of catch as catch can, and we kind of go with what we have. And I think what has come out of this in order to like have a good learning management system and a good delivery, The bigger picture question is how do we get more intentional about being a learning organization? And they take a step back from actually creating content and they're having these much bigger conversations. So what I try to do in this issue is reflect back, you know, what I'm hearing in the community that they feel like this is a really great time to level up because the business is changing super fast. Baby boomers are retiring. There aren't that many Gen Xers just demographically. So millennials are getting put into these leadership positions. And management positions faster than ever before. And so like, how do we upskill them more quickly? You've got all this technology change with AI, with video tools becoming more accessible. You've got this expectation out of your workforce that I want to get stuff on demand. I want it to be quick. I want it to be to the point. I don't want to sit in an hour-long course 6 weeks from now. Like, just like help me get the knowledge I need to keep making progress now. So like, I think that business driver, technology driver, workforce driver, like it just feels like this is a moment for AEC firms to really rethink how they're doing learning and development.