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KP Unpacked
Join serial entrepreneur KP Reddy for conversations and discussions around innovation, technology trends, and AI for startup founders, innovation catalysts & investors focused on the built environment (and beyond!)
KP Unpacked
Reinventing Career Paths in AEC
Ready to future-proof your career in AEC? This EXTENDED episode is filled with insights and opportunities tailored for early and mid-career professionals. Discover the compelling reasons behind the industry's struggles to attract and keep high-caliber professionals and what it means for your career trajectory.
Why do young architects feel disillusioned and frustrated? Our conversation digs deep into the heart of the marketing and compensation challenges plaguing the industry, debunking myths that architecture is all about glamorous, high-profile projects. The reality of working on everyday structures like schools and fire stations often brings disenchantment. We take a hard look at the stagnant old-school culture and minimal financial rewards that fail to match the expectations of many young professionals. Listen as we challenge the conventional career paths and propose alternative trajectories that could redefine success in the AEC world.
Act now—join our Early & Mid-Career Professionals mastermind group, limited spots available: https://kpreddy.co/mastermind-groups/early-and-mid-career-professionals
Calling all early and mid-career professionals in AEC. The industry is evolving fast. Will you disrupt or be disrupted? Led by Jeff Eccles, you can join our early and mid-career professionals mastermind group and gain the edge you need to thrive. Learn from the best, collaborating with elite mentors and top industry leaders. Future-proof your career as you master the skills to stay ahead in the ever-growing digital age, as well as innovating together, solving real-world challenges with a dynamic peer network across the KP Ready Co. World Spots are limited, so don't miss this opportunity to transform your career. Today you can apply on our website, kpreadyco. Click on the Programs tab and then click Mastermind Groups. Once there, scroll down, select Early and Mid-Career Professionals and join the opportunity of a lifetime. You are listening to KP Unpacked with KP Ready a weekly dose of insights for innovators and startups from the built environment and beyond. Want more discussions like this? Join KP's exclusive online community, the Catalyst Network. To learn more, visit kpreadyco. Slash Catalyst Network.
Speaker 2:All right, welcome back. This is KP Ready Unpacked. This is my opportunity to ask KP Ready hey, when you posted that on LinkedIn, what were you thinking or what inspired you to post that on LinkedIn? My name is Jeff Eccles. I'm a senior advisor and the director of our mastermind groups and our incubator at KP Ready Company, and, as usual, I'm joined by the man. That needs no introduction. He's our CEO and our founder is KP Ready. So KP, welcome back.
Speaker 1:Hey, jeff, how's it going? Good to see you, it's going great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, thank you. We're recording this. Right after Thanksgiving, before we hit record, we were talking about the Georgia-Georgia Tech game and the things that happened over the holiday. I know there's some anger and frustration around that. Maybe that comes out in this recording, I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we could talk about that. I think I posted a Sunday Scaries actually. If we want to talk about the Sunday Scaries and the Georgia Tech game. We can chat about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe that's a different episode, but yeah, that's something that a lot of people in our community this is a community. For those of you maybe you just happened upon this podcast somehow, you know, randomly it was suggested to you in some algorithm or something like that but but much of our audience, so to speak, much of our community, is, um, they're engineers and they're architects and they're construction managers, etc. It's uh, it's the people that that shape the design and and build and develop and operate the built environment. So there are an awful lot of of Georgia tech grads and other architecture and engineering school grads.
Speaker 2:So I, you know, I think discussions like that hit close to home for a lot of people but, but, or, and one of the things that you posted on your on your LinkedIn account that I shared out as well I re-shared was a survey that you did about the reason that people leave the AEC world.
Speaker 2:And so, for those of you that are out there and don't know this, one of the things that I do in addition to my role here at KP Ready Company is I teach in graduate and undergrad classes. I teach professional practice and I ask especially my undergrad students a very similar question. Basically, I ask them what do they want to get out of a career in architecture? So I'm teaching in architecture school specifically. So the A in the AEC. But I asked them what is it that you're interested in and maybe this is also a good setup for this conversation about the poll that you posted KP but the vast majority of those students don't say a traditional architecture role or traditional architecture firm, or a vast majority say not a traditional architecture role or not a traditional architecture firm.
Speaker 2:But your poll was specifically about why people leave the profession, the AEC industry. So why don't you give us a recap of what inspired you? Let's start there. What inspired you to post that poll? Because it got an awful lot of results, an awful lot of responses. But what was the impetus for posting that in the first place?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's the same thing that drove my interest in us starting the early career mastermind group, which was. I get hit up a lot from founders, from investors. My inbox is never empty, but one thing I prioritize in terms of getting on 15-minute calls and having a good conversation is with college students and early career people. I generally will prioritize them over most anyone just to understand what they're thinking, and it comes from a deep-rooted concern that our industry is just not attracting the right talent and our future talent base is really going to be very mediocre at best if we don't bring in talent that's like top of the top, and I'm seeing that pattern right, whether they leave to do a startup or go into other industries. I've seen a lot of people have reached out to me. They're like, oh yeah, I left architecture to go do UX design, which is fantastic. However, someone that has that creativity to move purely from architecture to UX design is someone we probably need in our industry, right? So I feel like many ways, if the best of the best move out, the regression to the mean of talent happens and it's going to be a lot lower than what it was. The middle will be a lot lower than what it was maybe 10, 15 years ago.
Speaker 3:So I think that's what motivated the poll. What I didn't expect was for people to get really that into it. We got a lot of reposts, we got a lot of. Now, statistically, we got 338 votes Statistically. Is that significant? No, it's not. So I'm not trying to do some quantitative analysis on this. It's more like just different patterns from this, and a lot of it was in the comments.
Speaker 2:Yeah, from this and like, and a lot of it was in the comments, yeah, and so, no, 338 is not statistically relevant in relation to the entire industry, but I, you know, I think in terms of a linkedin poll, it's actually um, it's actually a pretty good number. But even if, even if it's still in the realm of anecdotal, we get reinforcement of this over and over. Like I said, my students, my undergrad students, are reinforcing anecdotally or reinforcing this. You mentioned our early and mid-career mastermind group and, for those of you that are out there listening, this is a mastermind group that meets twice a month. We bring in speakers from all around the industry twice a month and it's a peer group, just like any mastermind group, where these early and mid-career, whether they're in.
Speaker 2:AEC or interested in AEC, they can join this group or they do join this group. I mean, I think we're expanding at about two people a week or something, so this is growing relatively rapidly here. And they show up to meet each other, they show up to network with each other, they show up to hear from other, they show up to network with each other, they show up to hear from people all around the industry about what these people, what these you know more seasoned professionals maybe, as a way to say it, what they see in terms of the future in the industry, what excites them about the future of the industry. And they also talk about their path to that point, which I think is another reason that people show up.
Speaker 2:And you know you and I launched that group because you and I had alternative paths. You're Georgia Tech Engineering, I'm Ball State Architecture, and neither one of us is acting, you know, as what our degree was right. We had these alternative paths through the industry and I think and I know you agree, but I think it's really important for us to expose the alternatives that are out there, but also as the reasons that you can and should be here and you, as an early and mid-career, you have the potential to change the future. We're on a precipice of change right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I think there's also kind of a bigger concerning topic, right, like, if you look at children, right, they play with blocks, they play with. At children right, they play with blocks, they play with legos, they play with bulldozers. By my two and a half year old is doing all those things. Um, they grow up, they start participating in robotics, things. There's different things in school, right? Oh, it's all very exciting, very creative, and then for the half of your students that are so, what you're saying is half of your students that are so, what you're saying is half of your students are already disenfranchised with the industry which means before they get there before they even get there.
Speaker 3:Then there's a second half that believes that, oh my God, I'm still so excited about architecture, I'm so excited about civil engineering, I'm going to be designing this and that, and they're very excited and very enthusiastic. And I remind the executives I deal with do you remember being that way Excited about the content of your work? And now all you do is review timesheets and fill out reports and everything that's not fun. And so I think to your point, half of your students are already disenfranchised. The other half will find out in short order that what they thought the job was is not what the job is Right, and so then we have that issue right. So we're already losing people. So I think one of the comments in the poll is we have a marketing problem yeah right, and, and I think that's true, right, I think that's true.
Speaker 3:um, and I think that the truth comes from if you're an architect and you're just an architecture geek and you're trying to be, you know, the nexthry, the next Zaha, the next Norm Foster, whatever, well, there's like five of those people. That's not the industry At large. That is not the industry. The industry is a lot of K through 12, a lot of fire stations. It's a lot of other stuff, right, as we think about the joy of work and what impact we have on society, I don't think we market it very well to an upcoming generation. So I think one of the things that people commented on is okay, we have a marketing problem, because the things that we do are cool in concept, but when it comes to day-to-day maybe a little bit less cool.
Speaker 3:And if you look at industries like the MEP engineering world, so you think about someone with a mechanical or electrical engineering degree they have lots of options, right, they have lots of options, right. It's not like the civils, right. It's not like you know, what are we going to do? We're going to do the same things. We have no choice but to enter the industry. We don't have a lot of options out there, but when you look at electrical and mechanical engineers, they can go work for Tesla or whoever. So we already have kind of a brain drain of the top talent going to those spots with the mechanical and electrical engineering.
Speaker 3:So I think, besides, how do we make the industry more fun? How do we keep it to its true form and have true mission-oriented firms? I think we have a lot of work to do. And now what I think of work to do, and now what I think you know. And now I think, if you look at it right, when we look at these students and they try to come through and they go take, get a job and then they get disenfranchised, the thing that I found was fascinating the poll is I, you know, I didn't call anyone out in terms of respondents when it came to kind of the culture, the old school culture question right there were several ceos of enr 500 firms that responded with that, which was annoying.
Speaker 2:It's like, well, that's your job yeah right like like you're, you're, you are the old school you are the old school.
Speaker 3:How about, like, do something about it. How about we do something? Like you're you know? So it's one thing to have a bunch of junior people say, oh, you know the culture, the old school culture. When you have the old school culture people saying it's the old school culture problem, like, why don't you do something about it? Which I thought was fascinating. Right On the compensation, same exact thing Bunch of the CEOs of these firms talking about it's. Like you literally have like it's. You know, if you're a junior person, you don't have a say in your compensation, but when you're the CEO of a 10,000, 25,000 person firm, what are you doing? Like you have an opportunity to do something about it, and so I thought that was super, super fascinating.
Speaker 3:The other kind of note which I had to sit there and, like LinkedIn does not do a good job with their analytics. I had to like print out the results and a lot of highlighters like old school. But one of the things that I found fascinating was almost 75% of the people that responded about compensation being a problem were all registered professionals, professional engineers, ses, aia, uh, which I found fascinating that there was such a bias towards compensation, which tells me a couple things, right, I mean, it's like I said, it's opinions rooted in some you know, some triggering of data that I see, right. So what it tells me is that as you matriculate up and now you're, like, registered, you're a principal, you've paid your dues, so to speak. Right that you're not. You don't feel like you're getting paid what you're worth, like I thought, once I get registered, I thought, once I hit that next level of pay, that I was going to make a lot more money.
Speaker 3:It turns out it's not a lot more money. And oh, by the way, now I'm also taking on more risk, right? So you know, I thought that I mean, that's the only thing I can glean from that. When 75% of the respondents are registered, that tells me a lot that I think that could be the thing. You know, it's the. We bring the young people on. We tell them here's the brass ring, get registered, become a principal, blah, blah, blah, grind it out till you get there. And once you get there, now you made it Turns out you haven't. It turns out it's just another day you haven't.
Speaker 2:It turns out it's just another day. Yeah, yeah, that's. It's interesting that you say that, because that that's sort of the story of my career, right, I looked at it and, um, you know the alternative route piece of it. I looked at it and said, okay, well, I'm really interested in the business side of architecture, the marketing and the business development side and eventually the management side of the firms, and I'm pretty good at that. And so if I actually sit for this exam and I become a licensed architect or registered architect, depending on what your state calls it.
Speaker 2:It's exactly what you're saying, right? Okay, they're going to give me a bump of like $1,000 a year.
Speaker 2:And then there's the risk of it right. Then there's the risk in the office and out of the office, of being that licensed professional. Why would I do that and that really kind of kicked me down that or partially kicked me down that licensed professional. Why would I do that and that really kind of kicked me down that or partially kicked me down that alternative path. And so that absolutely rings true for me. And it is no surprise to me that the old school culture, well, the number one response was the compensation. The old school culture was the second most popular response. But that's not a surprise at all.
Speaker 2:I think those of us that have been around, we know that. We also know that the culture piece of it is changing very rapidly with the generational change that's afoot right now. But I think you know you mentioned the mission-driven firms and the impact, and that's one of the things that we talk about a lot around KP Ready Company is because it's the answer right. Well, why do you guys run an incubator? Why do you guys run these mastermind groups? Why do you guys have this early and mid-career mastermind group? You know to what end?
Speaker 2:And we, our response to that is always sort of a mission-driven, purpose-driven response because we know that we can have an impact on people's lives right, the built environment has a bigger impact on humanity than just about anything out there.
Speaker 2:And by creating a better work environment, by having more talented people, by bringing new technology, you know all those things that we focus on, that we work on all the time. That is very mission driven, right and it's for the purpose of changing and improving the built environment, because the the reality is, if you go work for tesla or spacex or all those other great opportunities that are out there, there are days where that work sucks too right. There are days where that work is very mundane and all of that it you know it's. It may be, it may be sexier in the end, it may be flashier, but work is work right on some level. But, as you pointed out there, there is a mission here in the aec industry and we can do better in terms of creating workplaces, in terms of creating environments, and the compensation answer, I think, is always has been and until we make some significant changes, I think always will be at the top 100.
Speaker 3:But you know, like all the studies say, people do not quit their jobs because of compensation, right, right, but that's assuming they're earning a wage that they can actually pay their bills.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:That's a different topic. But you know, what I find out is all these early career folks. How many of them hit me up and would gladly take a 50 percent pay cut to come work for me. There's a line. There's a line of these kids that would happily. In some cases I've had some of them that said hey, I'll come work for free, I've saved enough money. If I can prove myself to you for three to six months, I'll come work for free KP. So compensation matters, but it doesn't. It also doesn't matter. There's also an interesting dynamic happening. If you are the top academic achiever, in engineering, for example, a little less architecture, but in engineering across disciplines, you are being recruited by McKinsey. Bain Booz Allen. Starting salary $ain Booz Allen. Starting salary 120 grand.
Speaker 2:Double what you would get somewhere else.
Speaker 3:Double right. So, in a world where these young people have put themselves under pressure with student loans, blah, blah, blah right, what are they going to do? Like, I mean, how do they look at themselves in the mirror and say, oh, I'm going to turn down a job that's twice as much money, twice as much money, and I got all these student loans? It doesn't leave them space to even think about, like, doing what's right. The other thing is, you know, short of working for Frank Gehry or Norm Foster, you graduate. You're at your graduation party with all your friends and family. Oh, who did you get a job offer? Yeah, man, like, where do you want to work? Oh, mckinsey, Bain, everybody's like. Oh wow, oh wow. Xyz. Architecture firm, who, what, when, where? Bain, everybody's like. Oh, wow, oh wow, xyz.
Speaker 1:Architecture Firm. Who, what, when, where?
Speaker 3:What's that? What do they do? I've never heard of them. Gensler, what's that? Like literally what's that. Who even knows what Gensler is? Right Outside of the two guys on this call, maybe half the population listening to this podcast. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody cares.
Speaker 2:Bottom line right. Maybe some of these AEC firms should take out.
Speaker 3:Super Bowl ads. Maybe A couple million bucks, a couple million bucks, right? Hey, wsp, take out a Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 2:Right right, you've already invested that in RFPs that you're going to lose.
Speaker 3:Just throwing that out there. So we do have a marketing problem. It's actually fascinating to me too, like when you watch college football season which we're all just kind of coming out of, when they do those little, you know vignette commercials around the different schools. You know SEC, acc, and then they'll have like Georgia Tech and you notice they're not doing anything AAC oriented. It's all like biotech, which Georgia Tech has a tiny, tiny biotech group, yet they want to show people with little pipettes and in the lab with lab coats and you know. And then they want to show rockets. They show everything but our industry because they want actually we actually want kids to come to their college. Show somebody at a drafting table That'll get kids to come to college.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100% true. I mean, my daughter, as you know, is at Purdue, similar school to Georgia tech and, um, while they, while they do do a lot of rocket things, uh, an awful lot of astronauts go to Purdue, the um, their, their marketing, which I you know, I guess this is what's the? Uh, what's the old saying marketers ruin everything, but, but their marketing is the sexy things, um, what is it right? That? That's a. That's a great point.
Speaker 2:We have a marketing problem. You know, we sit around you and I and the rest of our team. We sit around and talk about the impact of the things that we do, whether it's startups, whether it's the AE firms or the C firms or whoever it is that we consult with. We facilitate mastermind groups with innovation leaders or early and mid-career AEC professionals, and we talk about the impact of all of this work on the way that people live the lives all around the world and maybe beyond at this point, if we're talking about icon 3D printing on Mars.
Speaker 2:But that's the marketing problem, right, there's not the focus on those types of activities. So I think those comments and I think that idea is 100% on and I also think and I know we're going to get into this in a later conversation as we unpack more, um, more of your LinkedIn posts. But you know, I think we also have the problem of understanding how to have those conversations in a in a broader you know, with with owners and um uh, developers, operators, people like that. Because if we're going to get to the idea of compensation, we've got to be able to charge more, we've got to be able to understand the true value of what we're creating and we have to help these early mid-career people understand that.
Speaker 3:So here's what I'll tell you. The compensation problem is a leadership problem. You cannot complain 100%. You cannot complain about. You know the oh, my customers don't pay me more. Look at yourself in the mirror and realize you're not that good and that's why they're not. Look, the market dictates everything. If you can only charge X, it's kind of because you suck. That's the full stop, right? That's the tweet. You know this idea. Like the customers and the markets, you're not creating any value and you know why we're not creating any value.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the thing right there, the value yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, because we have firms full of mediocre talent. That's what it is and we run off the people that have talent. Some of them might go start their own firms, but they quickly realize why would I go start my own firm if I can only make X, you know? And so I think really, the reinvention of firms is really what it's. I mean, look, I get really frustrated about this topic, to the point that I'm like maybe I'll just go start an AE firm. This is just terrible what everybody's doing.
Speaker 3:And I have owner relationships and I talk to them plenty, and the funny thing is, when I ask them about compensation, like how firms charge them, they're like, yeah, they're a necessary evil. They don't create value. We need them because it's required, right, if you took away the required for registration, take that away Owners would probably just do it themselves. Contractors would get into the design world. So when you think about your only in the world of business, right, your only defensive moat in your market is a stamp and a piece of paper that the government approves. Once again, just because you're registered doesn't make you a good engineer. It basically means that you're good at passing a test and you've worked enough in the industry which, by the way, that's a big. So what?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, the um, yeah, when, when I do my commodity as this commodity does talk, I touch on that a lot, right? If? If the only thing, if your only defensible point is the license you lost. Right, that that's it, it's, it's over, because that that's a solvable question, right, how do we get around that? We can, we can figure that out, figure out how to get around that. People already are without any technology, right? So so 100, yeah, and it is, it's that is. You know your point about the value. What value are you creating? It's not, it's that is you know your point about the value. What value are you creating? It's not, it's not the stamp, it's not that. So, so you're, you're exactly right. The if leadership is not understanding not only how their clients, how the owners, see value, but but are not reaching out and saying how can we generate other, more value? That's, that's the one of the missing links no, it's interesting.
Speaker 3:I was talking to a group the other day. They're a real estate development group. They have contracted with an engineering firm and an architecture firm. All the design gets done in Pakistan. They pay these people a thousand dollars for set of drawings.
Speaker 3:You can argue about ethics, we can argue about all those things, right? Oh, is that illegal? Like great, whatever you know. We can argue that. But when I said like whatever you know, uh, we can argue that. But when I said like you know what, what do these architects and engineers feel about that?
Speaker 3:They're like this group in pakistan does a fan, does a better job than their own firms and it takes them an hour to review everything and it's a thousand bucks. So they're charging a thousand dollars an hour. And they're like they're doing great work. And now that we know their work, we know what to look for. Um, and we have a relationship with that firm, we're excited. Now this developer tells me this firm in pakistan. Not only are they cheaper labor, they're using technology. So they're charging them 10 percent of what a normal fee rate would be. Well, they're using cheap labor, they're using ai. They're staying very well organized and disciplined. Now he has a product with a high degree of repeatability, right, um. But yeah, like you know, we can hang our hat on like oh, they're not, they're, that's not ethical.
Speaker 2:Blah, blah, blah, you know yeah, we, we can, we can have that debate, but I mean free market.
Speaker 2:Free markets are free markets right yeah, yeah, and I was having that conversation right before the holiday with somebody, someone who's talking about offshoring or, you know, outsourcing or whatever. I'm just. You know, we talk about that Like that's a like that could be a negative thing, or we talk about that Like it could be a new thing. But you know, let's get real. Look at Gensler. You mentioned Gensler earlier. Ginsler has offices all over the world. What's one of the advantages of having offices all over the world? Right, we have other people in other places with different hourly rates and we can work 24 hours a day, and you know all those types of things.
Speaker 3:None of this is new yeah, try, try convincing a real estate developer in india to pay American wages. Not going to happen. Why would they Right? Why would they? Yeah? So, and I think that's the problem, right, as long as you're like, essentially, professional services are labor arbitrage businesses, right?
Speaker 3:And professional services businesses. They only exist for two reasons Capacity I need more people I need as a customer. I don't have as many people. I don't want to build out my own call center, I don't want to build out my own architecture division, just pure human body capacity. And the second one is competency I can't afford to keep. You know, I do a lot of advisory work, right? Why do I charge what I charge and all that Like I bring a competency that a firm can't afford to keep full time.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Right, and that's. Those are the two buckets capacity and competency and so I think a lot of these firms just don't think about it that way in any form or fashion. And you know it's an interesting time, look, I think, as you can tell, I get very frustrated about this stuff because, honestly, I'm talking to owners, and to go to an owner and hear that the industry that I, you know, second generation, grew up in this, you've been in, like these are our people. Right, I feel like in many ways, I'm like defending our entire industry when I get in these conversations, right, I feel like in many ways I'm like defending our entire industry.
Speaker 3:When I get in these conversations, yeah, I feel like I'm defending myself, you know, with the pocket knife, like it's just, it's just, I don't have a lot to go off of. And when these owners say things like, well, I mean aec, it's just necessary evil. These eight, these designers, ae firms, necessary evil. Now they're starting to say things about GCs. I mean they don't actually do work Right, and whenever there's a change order, they're supposed to be mitigating risk. I've never seen them eat a change order because they missed something. The designers missed something, the contractor missed something. Who pays for it? I pay for it and, by the way, I pay a lot more for it because it's after the fact. I had an owner tell me like if I could bid out change orders, I would interesting right because you know construction.
Speaker 3:Once you get, you know it's very competitive to get the job, but once you have the job it's monopoly right monopoly, right. Yeah, having been on that side, Once the wolf is in the hen house and there's a lot of, you know, quite honestly, there's some collusion, right. The contractors don't want to piss off the architects and engineers because they want to stay in their good graces so that they get invited to the next bid, and the owner doesn't know any better.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 3:And the owner doesn't know any better, right?
Speaker 2:So if we bring this conversation back around and if somehow you jumped in in the middle, I'm used to doing a lot of live shows too, so people show up in the middle, but if you're listening and maybe missed this at the very beginning, what we're doing right now is we're unpacking a post as we're recording this. It was about a week a week ago, I guess that you posted this on LinkedIn. Kp uh, posted a poll on LinkedIn and basically asked the question why can't we attract and retain the best early career talent in the AEC industry? And the results that came back. I don't think we're surprising good, good number of results, really great engagement around the poll and comments and votes and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:The number one reason according to 338 votes, 60% of the people that responded to the poll said compensation is the reason we can't attract and retain talent. The second most popular, and so between between these two tops, it's 90% of the responses. Number one was the compensation. Number two is the old school culture, and if you missed that part of the conversation, just go back to the beginning.
Speaker 2:Kp unpacked that, but as we, as we head towards wrapping this conversation up, kp may, and some of this is a is a recap. Obviously you've you've talked about it, but if you were to say, you know the the number one thing or the one or two things that absolutely have to happen across the AEC industry, whether you're an A, an E, a C or some combination thereof, what's the number one, or maybe the number one and two things that have to happen in this industry to keep it relevant? And, of course, that relevancy is judged by owners, is judged by the firm side and specifically the talent, right, that's the purpose of the poll. But what? What are the one or two things that have to happen in order to keep the aec industry relevant?
Speaker 3:I think we need to stop talking about um, about our work as a function of like design and this and that, right. If you are an architecture firm that designs a lot of stadiums, make it about designing stadiums. Like, get them look, I mean, it's fascinating, right. Like designing a stadium, like if you say, hey, you can be part, like we do this thing where, like pay your dues in a generic level, right. Instead of saying, oh my God, I'm a sports nut, I love architecture. All I want to do is stadiums. Stop putting that pre-career filter on them. Just put them in your stadium group, you know, I think. How do you design stadiums if you're not a sports?
Speaker 2:fan. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:How do you even know what that experience is like? Go into a stadium?
Speaker 3:I've met these people. They can't even kick a ball. They're not sports fans, right? And so I think, attract them early on the product that we design. You know, stop talking about designing schools, start talking about shaping education. Hey, do you want to, like, shape the future education of generations to come? That's the pitch, right? The pitch is not. Oh, come join Gensler. Who cares? I know we're picking on Gensler. Hopefully I'll get an email from them, but I always love those emails. Why are you picking on me? But no one cares right.
Speaker 3:But if you can say, hey, do you want to come design the newest Las Vegas A's or whatever they're calling them? Do you want to come work on this stadium project? Versus saying, oh, you're not qualified, go do some door and window details and then I'll let you come, why would you do that? Like, let them get excited about the thing. So I think one our firms are zero exciting, no one cares Right. But the projects we work on are very exciting and I think you have to hook them on the projects and being engaged with that.
Speaker 3:It's like one of my sons is really into airplanes and works at Delta. He's an industrial engineer, so he's fine being there. But if he was a civil engineer and he still has a fascination with planes. Hey, do you want to design some of the world's best airports? Yeah, he can name every type of plane type. He can look at a plane and just look at its wings and tell you what plane that is.
Speaker 3:So I think we've got to really dig into the work we do not our firm and all that and get people excited about that and, I think, focus them on that and also, I think, teach them things beyond. Here's how you draw classrooms, send them to things where they get to learn about the future of education, how people are thinking about education. It's one of those like I wish I could have been a high school teacher. I'm not, I'm an architect instead, but I want to be part of uplifting what the future high schools look like, and so I think that's where the mission should not be around the firm and dumb timesheets and who cares right, it should be around we do cool projects. Let's talk about the cool projects. Stop talking about our firms and get these kids involved early in a building type.
Speaker 2:Yeah a hundred percent and those of you that are out there listening to this. If you want to talk more about mission or purpose-driven organizations, I've got a whole talk on that, the value the inherent value that comes with a purpose-driven organization. I've got a handful of books on that shelf right up there Studies on the competitive landscape.
Speaker 2:When you're a purpose-driven organization, that also extends to recruiting and retaining what you're saying is 100% right, and it's not just architecture or engineering or construction, it's not just AEC, it's across the board. It's been studied for decades. But I think what you're saying it brings it all the way back around the mission-driven or the purpose-driven. Why is it that we do what we do? Why is it that you design those things? It is it you design those things.
Speaker 2:It's not about and I I have this conversation with professional services firms all the time. We get caught up in this, this thing that we design this jewel box that we design. That's not. That is not the uh reason that you were hired, right, if, if someone wants and I had this conversation with somebody not too long ago right, if somebody wants this, this beautiful jewel box museum, uh, designed by calatrava or somebody like that they're going to go hire calatrava. They're not hiring you, right? That's that's the thing. They're not. They don't really care about the jewel box per se. They want it to be beautiful, they want it, but, but the point is, they want the impact of that design, they want what comes from that design and that you know from what you're saying.
Speaker 3:That's exactly what we need to be promoting to our young people is this is this is the impact of what you're doing and I think there's this weird thing that we do in industry and that is, if you're not a senior person on a project, you do not get any attribution to your efforts, right, 100%, and so I don't care if you're a year out of college and you worked on an amazing stadium. Let that young person take credit, like, let them put it on Instagram, let them put it on TikTok, Like, let them take some credit for it. But we make them feel like, well, I mean, all you did was draw details. It's not really. I mean, can you really say you were part of the team?
Speaker 3:Like, we diminish, like their, their contribution, and so what? Let let them take credit, let them post all that up, you know. Let them go to christmas with their family and say, yeah, I was one of the designers on this new stadium. Let them, let them tell everyone, let them tell the world, right, don't. Don't tell like, oh well, you can't go around saying you're a designer because you weren't, you didn't seal the drawings like it's like.
Speaker 2:no, I said I was a designer, I didn't say I was the architect, and like, leave me the fuck alone yeah, you know that that resonates with me so powerfully because a couple months ago I did a trip up to chicago with someone and that I worked in chicago at the of my career and one of the projects that I worked on was the Chicago museum of contemporary art, and my role at the Chicago museum of contemporary art was the stair, the monumental stair that's, that is in that museum and it's the most photographed feature of the museum.
Speaker 2:Um, I had no idea until I researched it later, but we were walking through that. I said we talked about the museum and this is a stair and I worked on this stair and I downplayed that because that's what, when I was a young professional, what you're saying was exactly the thing. I can't take any credit for that stare. I can't, uh, to have any claim to that stare, any of that work, because I didn't seal the drawings, it wasn't the architect of record, etc. But that was my thing. I worked on that stare for almost two years and I was talking to this person um, you know, we're looking at it and she said you have to talk. Right, they're not from the profession, right? They don't? They don't get that dynamic that you're talking about.
Speaker 2:She says you have to talk about that, but that that is the most photographed, the most talked about feature of this entire museum and you were, you know, even though you were 24 years old or whatever, 25 years old or something, when you worked on that. That's an important part of your career and what you're saying is exactly right. I was never allowed to talk about it, never allowed to photograph what I do now because I don't care, but but it's like you. You are a demonstrator, you're pushed down and I and I that really resonates with you, with me, what you were just saying, because that is 100% my truth yeah, it's like for me, and I was a geotechnical engineer, which means I did like deep foundations on the olympic stadium right exactly I'm like that's my stadium.
Speaker 3:And then it was funny, I was. I was, as as my kids were getting older, like yeah, that's my stadium. Right, they were like dad, what did you design? I'm like all the stuff you can't see it's in the ground.
Speaker 1:They're like, oh, so you didn't actually design it I was was like well it designs a team effort, right.
Speaker 3:But no, I think there's just weird little things that we can do to really you know if we are. My point is, if we all recognize the industry as a problem, there's some simple ways to start changing the culture of how we think about things, and I think that's really getting rid of this hierarchy of thinking and pay your dues and the recognition from leadership.
Speaker 3:The industry that you joined 30 years ago was a different time, right. We now live in a different time with different talent. I mean, I get so frustrated too. Like these kids are so smart, they know so much, they are like very you know, we, we raised a generation and told them they need to be more well-rounded, right, and then it happened, and then now we complain about it.
Speaker 2:Exactly right, they're very smart, not just around stem, but around everything, and I think you know we have to realize that yeah, yeah, my my response because I hear that a lot like well, you know these, you know these, these young people, and my response to that is this is the way we raised them. What did we expect was going to happen? Right, this is it. Yeah, quit passing along the generational trauma of the old school culture.
Speaker 2:All right, I think that's a pretty good place to wrap up this conversation. So thank you for joining us, as KP and I unpacked his LinkedIn post where he asked the question why can't we attract and retain the best early career talent in the AEC industry? If you're not following KP on LinkedIn, you should be. That's where you find all of these posts that we talked about when we do these KP Unpacked episodes or Unpacking KP episodes. Today, we've been talking about this poll about attracting and retaining the best talent in the AEC industry, and we also mentioned our early and mid-career mastermind group, which is built to encourage people to stay in the industry and attract people into the industry. We bring in speakers. It's a peer group. It's a great networking opportunity.
Speaker 2:You to send your people to show them the value in the alternative paths. You probably have a program in your firm. I hear this all the time. Why would I send people to this when we have our own program in-house? Because you're really good at mentoring people on how to be an architect traditionally speaking, how to be an engineer traditionally speaking. Those traditionally speaking paths are eroding away. They're going away. We are talking about the reality of the future of the AEC industry. So if you want to know more, if you're interested in the early and mid-career either for yourself or for your people, go to our website kpreadyco, not coms kpreadyco. If you go to the programs tab at the top, you can hit the mastermind groups and you can find the button for early and mid-career professionals or it's a little bit of a long url kpreadyco. Slash mastermind dash groups. Slash early dash and dash mid dash career dash professionals.
Speaker 2:Just go to the website. Go to programs go to mastermind groups um yeah, we should.
Speaker 3:I will tell you what's been fascinating about this. Mastermind groups. 80% of the people, these young people, are paying for it out of their pocket.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, it's not what I expected.
Speaker 3:I did not expect that. That's how much pain they're in, right, like my firm won't pay for it. I think the best thing you can do as a firm leader is say hey, I get it, you're a little bit different, so I'm going to pay for you to go be part of this. This is how you capture the different, the people that we're concerned about losing, because they're a little different. Their mission is a little different. The way they're wired is a little bit different. If it's your top performing engineer that wants to be an engineer, this is not for them. This is for the people that just kind of you know they could create a lot of value to the firm. You want to keep them there, but they're just made a little bit different, built different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the questions that I've gotten more than once is well, what if I send my people there, or one of my people to this group, and and they get recruited away, or something like that?
Speaker 2:And you know, yeah, exactly, I mean my. My first question is what if you don't send them? Right, if you don't send them, if they're not already, they're going to be looking and they're going to get recruited away, or they're just going to leave on their own. They're looking for something else. But what a great opportunity to expose them to an alternative path, perhaps, and actually keep them, actually retain them, which is the whole point of of this effort.
Speaker 3:So yeah, also, what is it? What does it tell you? What does it tell you if you send your top performers to aia and they don't get recruited away?
Speaker 2:well, that is, uh, that's an excellent point. As a long-time aia member, that's still an excellent point. All right, you have, uh, you've been listening. Thanks for listening to another episode of KP Unpacked you can connect with.
Speaker 1:KP.
Speaker 3:Ready today at kpreadyco.
Speaker 1:That's K-P-R-E-D-D-Yco.
Speaker 3:And additionally follow him on LinkedIn at wwwlinkedincom.
Speaker 2:Slash I-N slash KP Ready Until next time we do this once a week where we go to KP's LinkedIn posts and the things he posts there on LinkedIn and I get to ask him hey, what were you thinking when you posted that? It's fun for me to ask that question, but it gives us insight into what's going on, the conversations that KP has and the way that he's thinking about the ABC industry. So, KP, thanks as always for joining me today and for those of you that are out there listening, thank always for joining me today and for those of you that are out there listening, thank you for joining us. We'll be back again next week with another KP Unpacked. Thanks, everybody.