The AEC industry, like any other sector, needs a unified and easy-to-access way to implement corporate learning and training, not only to meet requirements such as OSHA regulations, but also to ensure employees are keeping skills up to date and staying engaged. However, the extreme diversity in terms of roles and locations in this sector can make learning and training particularly challenging.
A modern approach to corporate learning offers a way to reach employees where they are and provide customized learning and training from the right place at the right time in the right setting.
The rise of hybrid work
One of the biggest training challenges for the AEC industry is the hybridized workforce. There’s a multi-constituency workforce with staff potentially spread among multiple work sites and locations who have potentially very different work environments. The organization is ultimately responsible for employees who all have different levels of connection to the organization: full-time employees, contractors and temporary workers. There’s also the office staff, including administrators and other professional services workers. Other roles, such as designers, architects and engineers, might move between the office and the field.
Having a mix of employees working in different offices, different sites and different locations isn’t exactly new, but it certainly has changed significantly in light of the pandemic, which caused a major shift in remote work. A survey co-conducted by HP found that in 2020, 80% of AEC professionals reported working remotely for at least part of the year. There are now more people working in different locations, whereas previously many of them may have been working in the same office.
Grappling with varying needs
It’s not just that employees are in different locations; it’s also that their roles and positions are incredibly varied. There are many different stakeholders under a single umbrella organization, and each employee likely has different training needs. Each group may need to be managed in different ways.
For instance, in-the-field employees may need a mobile platform they can access on-site. But perhaps the engineering team is always in the office on Friday, so their training can be conducted in-person. Office staff are going to have one set of training needs, field staff are going to have another set, as will engineering staff. And while each group will need different types of training, there is also always some training that’s universally required across an organization—like sexual harassment or other state-specific training.
Finding the right training and learning solution
What often happens in the AEC industry is that organizations either don’t do comprehensive training or it’s done in the old-fashioned way: employees are given packets to fill out during their breaks and in the field. This manual approach makes it much more difficult to keep track of who has learned what, when training has been completed and when it needs renewing. It also requires additional person-power to enter that information into a ledger or spreadsheet, adding to an inefficient system and has multiple potential points of failure in it.
What’s needed is a learning platform and a content strategy that can address all of the different training requirements of various employee groups in their different locations. Ideally, the platform will also be accessible from different locations. The idea of in-house training that everyone attends in one physical location is not practical anymore for almost any industry, but especially not for AEC.
Also ideal is a unified approach that doesn’t require learning a new program and that can be easily tracked. As mentioned previously, AEC firms are dealing with a variety of workers—like employees, contractors, subcontractors’ employees—all with different training needs. Firms don’t want to add to the complexity of this situation by requiring workers to learn a third-party system to do their training.
Another consideration is that for employees working at a jobsite, logging on to a computer during their workday may not be feasible. The learning strategy needs to take accessibility into account and provide for training that is available any time and anywhere. This way, employees will be able to learn at their own pace and in their normal workflows.
The training advantage
For many AEC organizations, training has been treated as a check-the-boxes, point-in-time undertaking. Training needed for things like meeting OSHA requirements was done, but training and learning hasn’t always been a larger part of the cultural fabric. It’s often seemed too hard, too complex or simply not necessary. But the reality is that in today’s modern AEC environment, a culture of learning and training is vital. It enables firms to stay compliant while also offering the training that keeps employees engaged and educated, resulting in a workforce of competent employees that creates a competitive advantage.
Organizations can overcome some of the traditional training barriers and successfully implement a training strategy by finding a unified learning solution. AEC firms should consider the best practices noted above as they vet solutions and craft a new or reinvigorated approach to training for their firms.
