In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Jackie Baxley, Principal and Practice Leader for Environmental Health, Safety, and Sustainability at HRP Associates. Jackie has spent years helping HRP evolve from a more organic, apprenticeship-driven learning culture into a more intentional learning organization that thinks carefully about competency, capability, incentives, mentorship, and organizational performance. Her perspective is shaped by the realities of consulting work, where the product is ultimately the people themselves.
One of the central ideas Jackie returns to throughout this conversation is that not every learning experience is trying to accomplish the same thing. Organizations often get into trouble when they fail to define the actual goal upfront. Is the goal simply communication? Awareness? Skills development? Demonstrated competency? Different goals require different approaches, different investments, and different ways of evaluating success.
Jackie walks through the practical frameworks HRP uses to think more intentionally about learning design, including her “inverted pyramid” model of communication, awareness, training, and competency, as well as the EDGE framework: Educate, Demonstrate, Guide, and Evaluate. We explore why awareness is not the same thing as competency, why repetition matters, how HRP approaches skills validation and quality audits, and why some learning experiences work best asynchronously while others must remain in person.
The conversation also explores the operational and economic realities of learning inside consulting firms. Jackie discusses how HRP has worked to remove the stigma around training and development by redesigning incentives, rethinking billability, and treating learning as a strategic investment rather than overhead. We also discuss HRP’s evolving employee lifecycle programs, their growing focus on soft skills and management development, and the challenge of building deeper organizational capability without turning learning into bureaucracy.
If you lead an AEC firm, manage teams, oversee operations, or are thinking about how to scale expertise more intentionally inside your organization, this episode offers a thoughtful and highly practical conversation about designing learning around real outcomes. A conversation about clearer goals, stronger capability development, and building modern learning organizations that keep getting smarter, by design.
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Episode Resources
People & Experts
Kent Jonasen — CEO, Leadership Pipeline Institute
https://www.leadershippipeline.com
Books
The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company — Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, James Noel
The Specialist Pipeline: Career Development for Technical and Professional Specialists — Kent Jonasen, Stephen Drotter, Aigerim Edwards
📃 Episode Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: You are Jackie Baxley, Principal and Practice Leader for Environmental Health, Safety and Sustainability at HRP Associates. It's a multidisciplinary environmental and engineering consulting firm serving both public and private sector clients. You and your firm are in the LMS beta for Synthesis.
What drew me to you and made me want to invite you on Smarter by Design is how thoughtful you've been in terms of crafting your firm's approach to learning, and especially, we're going to spend a lot of time here, being very explicit around the goals of learning, what good looks like, measurement, competencies, being precise around language.
Something I've learned from you is an emphasis on the difference between organizations that hold learning events and ones that build capabilities. We want to dig into that today, but I'd like to get started with a sense of HRP and then your role at HRP. So if you could give us a picture of that, that'd be a good place to start.
Jackie: Yeah, great. And thanks, Christopher, for having me on the podcast here.
So my role at HRP as the practice leader, as you said in your introduction, is both an inward-facing role and an outward-facing role. Inwardly facing, I'm looking at our team of practitioners relative to environmental health and safety compliance and sustainability. Those practitioners are working with our clients to understand their regulatory footprint, to understand maybe what gaps they have in their regulatory programs, and to help them fill in those gaps. So I work with our practitioners to ensure skills development, professional development, and quality assurance and quality control tools. That's the very inward-facing side of my role.
And then the outward-facing side of my role is also doing all the same things that our practitioners are doing — helping clients understand their risk, navigate their risk, and design sustainable programs to mitigate compliance issues that might surround the stakeholders.
Chris: If you were to try and take a guess at how you split your time between internal and external, what do you think it would be?
Jackie: Oh, goodness, pick a week — they can be very different. There are some weeks where we maybe have a big project that involves a lot of oversight from a level such as mine, and so there are some weeks where it could be upwards of 75% of my time outward-facing. And then similarly, there could be some weeks where the external stakeholders are being managed and controlled perfectly well within our team, and I'm not having to be brought in on higher-level consulting needs or issues. And then I'm primarily working on our controls and protocols, improving those, and just building sustainable operations within our practice.
Chris: Where did that passion for learning and building — you're doing knowledge management, right? You may not call it that, but I watch a lot of what you're doing, doing knowledge management, doing learning and development, even though you're not a knowledge manager or a learning and development person. Where did that interest come from, and how soon did you start doing that kind of work for your company?
Jackie: So I've been in the practice leader role maybe about 10 years, give or take — I should probably know that better than I do. I started with the company as a practitioner, as what we now call a senior consultant, worked my way through project management, and have been in the practice leader role, we'll just say 10 years. Learning management is consulting, honestly. We don't make a tool, we don't make a part, we don't make two-by-fours — our product is our people. And so our people need to be well-versed in understanding the regulations, well-versed in understanding how those regulations apply differently to different types of clients, maybe different industries, even different states and municipalities sometimes. Learning is critical in consulting because if you're not constantly learning, then you're not providing the best advice for your clients and your stakeholder group. So I wouldn't say there was a moment that the interest became peak or prime or essential, as much as it's always been baked into the cake.
Chris: I like what you said — I think that's true for all AEC firms. We work with a lot of companies, and so I spot things that are outliers. Some of the things I think I've noticed about the way that you're working: there's the kind of oldest way we've learned in our industry, through apprenticeship and learning by doing and shadowing somebody — they're there to catch you when you fall and give you slightly harder assignments. I'm sure there's plenty of that happening at HRP, but there's also this much more intentional, organized approach to making sure people consistently get information. When you stepped into the role as a consultant, was it already heavily organized and intentional like that, or is that something that's changed?
Jackie: I would say it has significantly changed, largely because our company has changed. I started my career in industry — about the first third of my career I was in industry, as an environmental engineer in the textile industry and then the chemical industry. The last two-thirds of my career I've been in consulting. When I first started with HRP, we were a smaller company, so our infrastructure was smaller because we were smaller. Our infrastructure has really expanded and evolved. To speak to the platform we use from Knowledge Architecture — we call it HIKE. So if you hear me say HIKE, I'm talking about our Knowledge Architecture platform. It's an acronym — I think it stands for HRP Information Knowledge Exchange, but I think we were just trying to find a word that had an appropriate acronym.
Chris: That's very common — people start with the word and work backwards.
Jackie: Right, exactly. So when I say HIKE, I'm talking about our Knowledge Architecture platform. I started in 2007 at HRP, and in 2007 we had an intranet platform that grew and evolved and got unwieldy over time because it was very organic — you just added to it as opposed to taking anything away. We used that system for a long time. And then we started to engage with Knowledge Architecture, and we had this whole wonderful rollout plan, and then the pandemic hit, and we were like, we can't wait, we need to make sure we have all of this. So our infrastructure has really evolved over the last six or seven years with the platforms we're using with Knowledge Architecture. We always had the same information — it was just harder to find.
Chris: Right.
Jackie: So remind me what your question was, 'cause I got all—
Chris: No, no, that's fine. I think there's the technology and the infrastructure, but there's also a mindset. As an example, you've shared this inverse pyramid that you use when thinking about training and being clear about what we're doing it for — is it for awareness, communication, or competency? What are we trying to do? And you've actually got competencies mapped out for your people, which I do want to get to. That's a level of sophistication that not all firms get to, and it goes well beyond technology.
Jackie: And to be clear, we're not there — we're still very much on our journey, on our road. Just so anybody out there doesn't think we're so much farther ahead than other folks — we're just getting caught trying, that's where we are right now. There's aspirational, and there's actual, and we're somewhere in between right now. We have HIKE, where we have our written protocols, our programs, our procedures, historical training, information. And then, what you were speaking to, our inverse pyramid — I brought that into our vernacular mainly from my experience working with ISO management systems. ISO management systems are something we help our clients and stakeholders with, whether they're seeking ISO 14001 certification for an environmental management system or 45001 for an occupational health and safety management system. That inverse pyramid is the way my mind works — I'm an engineer by education, I need to see things sometimes to understand them. So that inverse pyramid is what I've baked into a lot of our consultation relative to management systems, because if you look at the ISO 14001 platform, for example, it speaks very specifically: your environmental communication needs to address X, Y, and Z, or be based off of X, Y, and Z; your awareness needs to include this; your competency needs to address that.
So I created that pyramid initially as I was doing training for our stakeholders, and then I realized, hey, what's good for our clients is good for us as well, and started baking that into our internal communication relative to our training and competency program. So, if I can describe what we mean by the inverse pyramid: it's a pyramid, upside down. At the bottom, the small tip, is communication. Communication can be a one-and-done — I've communicated X to you, you've communicated Y to me. It can be a single point in time.
Chris: As an example, this would be: there's some new law or new regulation, and everybody needs to know about it. It could just be, send it out.
Jackie: Yep — we've told you. The regs say we need to tell you X, Y, and Z; we're telling you X, Y, and Z. It can be a single moment in time. Maybe there's some back and forth, maybe some interaction, but it can be as simple as, "regs say I have to communicate, we've communicated." Regs say I have to send this message to this organization, we have sent that message. So communication can be looked at as potentially a one-and-done situation — it can almost be a check-the-box exercise. It doesn't necessarily matter if someone understood it or not, you just have to show that you did the thing.
Chris: Correct — you have been communicated to. Whether you absorbed that communication, that's awareness.
Jackie: And so that's the next tier on the pyramid — awareness. If somebody needs to be aware of the communication, there may be some degree of remedial action based off of that communication, and that's only going to be accomplished with repetition. So awareness is built on repetition. If we want somebody to have more than just "communicated, check the box" — if we want them to have a baseline of knowledge with maybe some type of remedial action — that's going to be built by repetition. It might be multiple communication events, different types of communication. Maybe we say it first in an all-hands meeting, and then at HRP we have weekly communication flyers that go out to everybody on Monday — this is what you need to know for this week at HRP. That also gets posted on HIKE. We might reiterate it in weekly team meetings, and then post it on the next month's health and safety newsletter. So awareness is repetition. Normally we might have a drive this month to communicate something and drive that awareness, and three months from now we'll probably come back and circulate on it again, because awareness is just repeat and repeat and repeat — and normally in a lot of different styles, because some things are going to hit some people and not others.
That's the second tier of our pyramid, awareness. The next tier is training. With training, you're normally imparting some type of skill — that's going to be more detailed than awareness, a little more involved, more attention to detail, more structured. And then competency is the top of the pyramid, the widest part. That has demonstrated skill and awareness, and it builds over time — you're going to get that from communication, from awareness, from training, from all the things.
I'll give you an example I commonly see when working with clients and stakeholders. Employers need to make sure their employees are aware of the hazards of the chemicals they work with — that's under the OSHA Hazard Communication program, which requires training and information. One of the elements of that program is that employees need to have access to what's called a safety data sheet, which is specific to a chemical and tells the user what the health hazards are, the physical hazards, and what personal protective equipment they need. Here's a very practical example of the breakdown from communication to awareness to competency: employers are really good about telling employees, "Hey, you need a safety data sheet, it's located on SharePoint." In an audit, I'll interview employees — "Where do you get a safety data sheet?" They say, "Oh yeah, we go to SharePoint." So there's been that communication—
Chris: So you're validating that the awareness has happened.
Jackie: Correct — they're aware the safety data sheet is on SharePoint. When I ask them to pull up a safety data sheet for a chemical they're using, they can't do it. So that's an example of where awareness still isn't enough. They're aware it's on SharePoint, but they don't have the skills to access SharePoint — there was a different level of training that maybe broke down, or they don't have the competency to actually access it. They need to physically be able to access the safety data sheet. That's an example of where the awareness worked really well, but the training piece — the skills that are further communicated, "this is how you access SharePoint, here's the training video if you forget" — is where we just see people freeze. "I know it's on SharePoint, I can't even tell you how to get to SharePoint." So there's a competency that breaks down.
Chris: That's really good. Going back to the bottom of the pyramid — on the communication side, it's not necessarily audited or followed up to make sure it worked, but when you get to awareness, it sounds like there's some level of wanting to sample, or at least see if the awareness activity is effective. And when you get to training versus competency, do you audit differently for each, or is competency the result of the training being successful?
Jackie: I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going to go back a second. You mentioned earlier that I harp a lot on why we're doing the training. I think "training" is an overused word — why are we imparting information onto our stakeholders, whether it's training, awareness, communication, whatever — and what do we hope to gain? Go back to what we learned in elementary school: the who, what, when, where, why, how. We need to understand the who, what, when, where, why, how of that content. And if it's mission-critical — if the skill, the content, the information is mission-critical — then there's got to be a skill check, a competency check. That's different for different things.
I'll give you an example from my role as practice leader: we have a quality management system, as I imagine many organizations do. We do annual training in our quality management system, awareness campaigns throughout the year — don't forget this, remember this — and we check competency by doing quality audits every year. What we find in our quality audits — any findings — we then look at the root cause of why this aspect keeps getting missed, or this detail isn't quite where we want it to be. So we're gauging competency through auditing in that example, and then doing a root cause analysis.
Chris: But you're auditing the end product — you're not auditing whether the person learned this. It's, did it show up in the work?
Jackie: We're auditing the process and the end product. Because hopefully, by auditing the process, if we see something's not effective, we can go back and identify why — is our training not effective, is our communication not effective, are the processes too cumbersome? And we can tweak and constantly evolve. So an audit is a great example of a competency check. Just normal quality assurance and quality control in a business like ours, where our people are our product, we're gauging competency throughout key milestone aspects of any particular project. If we're reviewing a milestone and the report isn't forming the correct conclusions, we can see — whether it's the hands-on learning, the mentorship, whatever we've done to build that skill — we're not done yet. So in that milestone review, instead of just handing back a red-lined, bleeding document, we sit down: "this is why I said this, this is why I did that, do you have any questions?" We also have a peer review aspect in our quality program. If an error makes it through a scope of work — went through peer review, got to the manager review, and there's that error — we sit down with both the preparer and the peer reviewer, because it went through two passes, two people, so folks learn it that way. That's embedding the mentorship. But again, it's that competency check, baked in throughout — but it's at the top of the pyramid because that's your goal, to gain competency.
Chris: Right. But it's interesting, because I think a lot of times, at least for me, I'd just assume the competency check is on the person — but you're really looking at whether HRP learned this. You're auditing the organization as a learning organization, in a way.
Jackie: Yeah, because that's our innovation. In consulting, innovation is learning. If we were making a part, a widget, innovation would be improving that widget — reducing the calls, reducing the waste, adding bells and whistles. But in what we do, innovation is in the individual, not in the product. And that's only accomplished with learning and development.
Chris: Are there areas where you're not just doing competency checks on the org — where you're actually looking, "this person needs to learn this thing, we put them through training, we did whatever the thing is — can they repeatedly do it?"
Jackie: Correct, absolutely. And this is, again, that line between actual and aspirational — we're working toward a more defined and regimented checklist of that skill demonstration. It's been a little parochial to this point.
Chris: Meaning by office?
Jackie: By office, by individual, by team. And we want to avoid the pot roast problem. If you don't know what I mean by the pot roast problem — it's an old story about a newly married couple. I'm going to say the husband is making the pot roast, since my husband's a better cook than I am. He takes the pot roast and cuts an inch or two off one end and the other end, and cooks it. After doing this for years, the wife finally asks, "Why do you always cut that off? What are you doing?" And he says, "Because that's how my mom always did it." So they call the mom, and it turns out it's because her pan was too small to fit a pot roast — they always had to cut off the ends for it to bake.
That's the problem with parochial training — bad habits filter through, old habits filter through, and it's not the best anymore. So something we're moving toward is a more defined checklist built off what's called the EDGE method. I can't take credit for it — I first learned about the EDGE method when my son was in Scouts. EDGE is an acronym: Educate, Demonstrate, Guide, Evaluate. In our skills competency checklist, there's an education piece — what we'd traditionally think of as training, whether it's a recorded presentation or reviewing a standard operating procedure. Then there's the skills demonstration piece, and we'll have people who know the skill well enough to be the demonstrator — certified demonstrators, if you will, educators, however we want to call them — so we're not cutting off the ends of the pot roast, but actually doing the best practice of the day. There's a series of: you watch me do this, now I watch you do this, I stand back and see if you can do it without my assistance, and you graduate up to that within an evaluation period to make sure bad habits haven't crept back in.
The reason I say this is kind of aspirational is because it's difficult — in consulting, some of what we do is very skills-based. You've got to do a slug test, which is very skills-based, and then—
Chris: Can you tell us what a slug test is, so we have that as an example to work through?
Jackie: I don't actually know exactly what a slug test is, because that's in the environmental practice — but it's used in groundwater sampling. I can send you a YouTube video.
Chris: That sounds great, I'd love that.
Jackie: Yeah, so it's some kind of sampling of water to evaluate toxins or something like that — what my colleagues in our environmental discipline do. It's fresh in my mind because we just did slug test training. I'll give you an example of how that works through the EDGE method: we have a video on how to do a slug test, which we use for our own people and can also use for other stakeholders — it's on HRP's YouTube channel. Then there's the skills demonstration piece — education, videos, training, in-person training, and then skills demonstration out in the field with a colleague.
Chris: Okay, so before you go out in the field, you watch the video.
Jackie: Correct — if you've never done this before, before you go out in the field and work alongside this person, watch this video first. That's very tangible, skills-based — you know how to do it or you don't, it's very tactile, with equipment, versus knowledge-based. In the compliance world — which I know more about — we're reading and understanding and applying regulations. That's not something I can show you. It's not tactile. We can read a regulation together, talk about what it means, but how it gets applied at a customer site, in an industry, in a different state or municipality, it's all going to change.
Chris: Based on the specific conditions of that client?
Jackie: Correct.
Chris: So then you do case-based scenarios or simulations so they can apply it in different situations?
Jackie: Right, right — we can say, "okay, you're using this product instead of this product." That's more knowledge-based versus skills-based, and the approach is very different. It's going to be a lot easier for us to build that skills checklist with the EDGE method in our more tactile disciplines, where we're out in the field doing groundwater sampling or bellying a well. It's going to be a lot more wiggly relative to regulation, because you've got federal, state, and even municipal regulations — you've got to blend all of those and apply them to the client's scenario. It takes a lot more collaboration with your peers and subject matter experts to understand all the nuances of application.
Chris: I'm trying to put myself in the position of the evaluator. In the first example, where I'm in the field watching somebody, I can literally see the movements they're making.
Jackie: Correct.
Chris: Whereas in the compliance world, I can't see what's going on in somebody's head — I can't see the wheels turning.
Jackie: Correct, which is why in some of our practices — the compliance practice — our quality management system and quality assurance and quality controls are critical to evaluating employee development and training.
Chris: Because you can't see into the process with that kind of granularity, you have to evaluate the outputs — that's your way to do it.
Jackie: With the quality assurance and quality control, we have tools on the front end to lead and guide, and tools on the back end before it goes out to a client.
Chris: Yeah, that's interesting. One thing you've said to me is that training as a word gets a little overused. What do you mean by that?
Jackie: I think because we all have a preconceived notion of what training is — sitting in a classroom, or sitting in front of a self-guided online module. If you look up a dictionary definition of training, it's normally going to speak to skills — the process of learning the skill you need to do a particular job. I think it's just a catch-all when we're talking about imparting knowledge. Sometimes training of a skill is appropriate, sometimes education is appropriate — and is education and training the same? I think in a workplace setting they're used interchangeably, but back to our skills demonstration — training is really skills demonstration. Education is what builds our team in the compliance world. We have to educate them on the regs, educate them on how to apply the regs, have this series of hypothetical conversations — well, what if this, what if that — to truly educate the person to be a subject matter expert in a particular regulation or topic. And then some aspects will be very skills-based, where training is involved, especially when we're talking about calculations along certain lines. I think communication is overused, training is overused — which is why I think if we focus less on the words and more on the who, what, when, where, why, how, and develop a program around that.
Chris: I think what you're saying is, people hear different things when you use words like training and communication, and if you haven't articulated the goal — your hopes and dreams for what this thing will accomplish — then who knows how you'd know if it's successful?
Jackie: Correct. And it's also important to recognize that training sometimes has a negative connotation in a consulting-type space — a lot of times it's looked at as overhead. But it's really vital — the imparting of knowledge and development and skills is how one innovates in a consulting arena, in a services arena. We're not going to innovate a regulation, but we're going to innovate on how we understand and apply it, and we do that through the imparting of knowledge, skills, and competencies. But a lot of times, when you're in a space that sells hours, some individuals will hear the word "training" and their mind will immediately go to overhead and unbillable hours.
Chris: Let's say there are three buckets of people: firm leaders, project managers, and the people working on the projects. Who's worried about training in that scenario?
Jackie: I think everybody is worried about training in a different way. If you're a team member, more at the entry level, where your learning curve is rapidly going up, you're going to be thinking about training as a vital part of your career growth, your knowledge, your competencies.
Chris: But are you worried about the billable piece of that for the team member?
Jackie: Correct. And then — I'll come back to that. If you're a project manager, and your metrics are on your time, on your team's billable charge rate, you might be hesitant on training because, sure, they need to know it, but if they have all this overhead, that might look bad on you, because your team's TU is low that particular month. If you're at that managing director role, responsible for staff development and competencies within a practice, you see it as vital — essential for the sustainability of that practice. And then at the executive level, it depends — if you're the financial officer, you're going to be looking at billable rates and all that. I think there are paradigm shifts that need to occur sometimes. Training is not a four-letter word, and skills, education, whatever we want to call it, isn't bad — we just need to be smart about it.
What I mean by that is — your people are your product. I started my career in industry, and in industry, there are value-added costs and non-value-added costs, depending on whether that cost is captured in what you're selling. When I was in industry, as an environmental engineer, I never touched the product at all — I was non-value-added relative to pricing that item. In consulting, we have to look at the cost of training as value-added — it goes directly into your product. So I think it takes some paradigm shifts within organizations. Not saying we've mastered it, but we've made great strides looking at it in a different direction. We've done a couple of things over the last few years. If you're being trained in a skill, educated in a regulation, any imparting of knowledge that's contributing to a project, you put that time onto the job that's benefiting from that skill—
Chris: So, I've never done a slug report, I need to do one for this project, I need to get trained—
Jackie: Watch this 30-minute video—
Chris: —and then I'm going to bill it to the project.
Jackie: And I'm going to bill it to the project. And what's super important for any clients listening — billing means it's assigned to your job. Billing it to your job does not mean that cost actually goes to the client.
Chris: Doesn't mean it's going on the invoice.
Jackie: Correct. But we can't even make that determination if it's not going to the job. So we're capturing a more representative picture of what it truly cost us to do our work. If somebody's out on a job site, in that early phase of EDGE, where they've gone through the education and are now in the demonstration phase, shadowing somebody — even if we budgeted the job for just one person out in the field, and now we have two — there was a time we'd say, primary person bills it to the job, secondary person bills it to training, which is overhead. Now we have them both bill it to the job, but the client still only sees what was in our budget, what was in our quote. On the financial side, we see the true cost of our business, the true cost of our project — we're not hiding things in overhead anymore. That was one switch we made.
Chris: But that gives the person who would be the demonstrator — maybe they do it a little more slowly because they've got that person with them — the freedom to do that, because their project isn't penalized.
Jackie: Correct, nobody gets penalized in that situation. The project manager doesn't get penalized for having a team member with a lot of overhead that week. The client doesn't get penalized by having to pay for two people where we said we'd only send one. Nobody gets penalized. So it's one of the steps we've taken to remove that stigma from training.
Chris: The other penalty could have been that the team member just doesn't get taken along.
Jackie: Correct — and then you don't have somebody you need. We're seeing positive aspects of just that simple shift. There could be companies out there that's what they've always done, but that was a shift for us. We documented it, standardized it, made it consistent, communicated it over and over, so there's that awareness piece — everybody knows what to bill it to. And we're very intentional: if something needs to be billed to overhead that's not related to any project, we say, "bill this to the training overhead job number."
Chris: So just general development for a person, not for a specific project.
Jackie: Correct, exactly. Maybe we have a new procedure at HRP and need to train everybody — that's not going to one job, so that goes to our training overhead. The other thing we've done that's also really good — and this is a nuance in consulting — very commonly, an employee is only paid overtime if it's more than 40 billable hours in a week. So somebody could work a 45-hour week, with 39 billable and six not, and just get their standard paycheck for that week. Below a manager level — not for managers and above, but at that critical piece where people are developing skills — you get paid for every overtime hour. That's because we have a lot of resources, a lot of "here is the water, all you need to do is drink," and we wanted people not to perceive being penalized for taking that drink. Why would somebody work a 48-hour week when they're not going to get paid for eight of those hours? We want people to take accountability and responsibility for their professional development and training. If somebody works an extra hour because they heard a colleague talking about a project they don't know much about, and they want to go on HIKE and learn more about it so the next time it comes up they can raise their hand — we want to encourage that. So that's the other thing we did to remove the stigma of training: our consulting teams get paid for every hour of overtime, not only if it's billable.
Chris: That's great. It feels like, going back to our different stakeholders — team member, project lead, managing director, executives — we all agree that developing our people is important.
Jackie: Correct.
Chris: But the old system just had different incentive structures for different members of that group.
Jackie: I like to use the term false roadblocks.
Chris: False roadblocks, yeah.
Jackie: I mean, why is this roadblock here? Let's remove it — it adds no value. There's stigma, misperception, wrong incentive structures, whatever it is.
Chris: This may fall somewhere on the aspirational-versus-actual spectrum, but I want to talk about competencies for a minute, because it's something I think bedevils a lot of firms — sounds great in theory, but in practice, how do you actually define competencies for different roles, and where do you even start? To the extent you've gotten traction on this, I'd love to hear your process and experience.
Jackie: It's difficult. I wish I could tell you we've got the secret sauce — I love talking to other companies about how they gauge this. We work with technical people, and technical people like numbers, so where we can have measurable key performance indicators, we try to. But then there's the balance of whether something is a leading or lagging indicator. Time utilization is a perfect example. If somebody's TU was really low last week, there's nothing I can do about that — that's a lagging indicator, I can't go back and put more billable time on their calendar. But it can still be informative — maybe our scheduling isn't as detailed as we thought. And it connects to these skills, this competency — what if their TU was low because all the work we had last week, they couldn't do? Why couldn't they do it? Why haven't we trained that person on that?
So we have skill matrices — this person can do this, this person can do that. It's a little subjective, and that's where engineers and scientists get squirrelly, because it is subjective. But we know folks' performance indicators, and we're always trying to match the right person to the job based on their skills and competencies. Where we can't use somebody on a job, and that's the only person available, that's a lagging indicator telling us we weren't proactive enough on the front end to build a deeper bench.
Chris: You got exposed.
Jackie: Yeah, right. And sometimes we're just busy all over the place — we're training our children next, sometimes it's just busy. But yeah, those lagging indicators can help inform where we need to build skills and competencies. Do we have a good handle on defining those? We have a handle — is it the best handle? I don't know, that's something I'm always looking for. We've gone different directions — "how many years have you been doing this" — but maybe they've worked on one project a year for five years; is that really five years of experience, or five projects over five years? So we've looked at years of experience, number of related projects, played around with a bunch of different approaches.
Chris: But you're inferring competency through experience, versus — like in the slug test — actually auditing it.
Jackie: Correct. As we go toward that onboarding skills matrix, it'll be more quantifiable — "this person can do this." But it's not bulletproof. At this moment, somebody can do the skill, they've gone through the process, the checkoff, the sign-offs, they've got it. But what if that person doesn't get assigned to a project requiring that skill for four years?
Chris: Yep.
Jackie: Do we need to go back? That's where the details get in the way.
Chris: So you almost need a re-certification, without turning it into a crazy bureaucracy.
Jackie: Correct, exactly. That's the piece we haven't fleshed out yet — baby steps. Step one: what are the skills we're going to develop this program around? Step two: develop the program for each skill. Step three: implement it. Step four is the maintaining piece.
Chris: Right.
Jackie: And that's going to be step four from now.
Chris: Don't let step four get in the way of making progress on steps one through three.
Jackie: Right, exactly. So we're just trying to get caught trying right now as we work toward it.
Chris: It's interesting — so many firms struggle with this. I don't know if anyone's got it licked. If you do, please email us at smarter@knowledge-architecture.com and tell us your secret. But there's also an assessment challenge — just because you can do it today doesn't mean you can do it four years from now. I'm assuming there's another one: it's easier to assess whether someone is competent at a slug test versus giving and receiving feedback, which is more of a soft skill.
Jackie: Right.
Chris: As you're getting caught trying up the hill, are you making progress by focusing on the ones that are easier to observe, or are you going after the harder ones too?
Jackie: I'd say we're doing all of the above, and going about them very differently. There are the skills and competencies of the craft — what we're doing for a client. Can you do a slug test? Can you write an SPCC plan? Can you do this training for this client, this OSHA topic? That's the craft. And then there's what you're speaking to, the soft skills — working with others, working within a team, meeting deadlines, meeting expectations, setting expectations. We have this mantra: set expectations, meet expectations; if you identify a deviation, communicate that deviation, reset the expectation, and meet the new expectation. Things always come up, but you've got to communicate that.
Two years ago, we developed an internal training program we call the employee lifecycle. It starts with onboarding and goes all the way through exit. It's relatively new, so we're shotgunning it out. It includes employees who are zero to one years in, who go through a program called HRP 101 — the basics of consulting. What is this business and industry you've gotten yourself into? What do we mean by billable time? What do we mean by communications? Why are deadlines important? Why is that billable hour important? Welcome to the world of consulting, welcome to HRP. It's only in person — we do not let people connect in remotely. It's at our corporate headquarters in Connecticut.
Chris: Who does it?
Jackie: We do it internally — I'm one of the teachers. There's a team of us, a diverse mix, about five people on that training committee. We divide and conquer, and get feedback from those who go through it — what did you like, what did you not like, what did we spend too much or too little time on. It tweaks each year based on that feedback, plus trends we're hearing from managers.
So the employee lifecycle goes from HRP 101 — we have a 401 in there too, but we're shotgunning it. We initiated HRP 101 in 2024, implemented HRP 201 last year. 201 is for those folks roughly three to five years in — past the 101 level, maybe on the cusp of being promoted from associate consultant to consultant, or consultant to senior consultant, or the equivalent on the business support side. 201 gets more into the details — how the sausage is made, walking through budgets, profit and loss, why and how we organize budgets. There's a bit more career development there too. We learned it was premature to jump into career path planning at the 101 level — they're still figuring things out.
301 hasn't launched yet — that's for team members about to go into a manager role, or newly in one. And then there's one beyond that, which we're calling the concierge program, for our project managers specifically — launching this year.
Chris: Why is it called a concierge program?
Jackie: I have no idea — I wasn't involved in that brainstorming. I think it's because a concierge gets you things on-demand that you need in the moment.
Chris: Right, exactly.
Jackie: So instead of having an HRP concierge at the front desk you go to, it's more of a collective of all the managers, with some specialized tools we're working on — HIKE is really crucial for this. New managers will be placed with more developed managers — we have tangible metrics for our managers, and a new manager would have a buddy who's a high-performing manager. I'm being a little wiggly with this because we're in process — 2026 is our launch.
Chris: It's kind of a community of practice plus pair mentorship.
Jackie: Correct — partnership, mentorship. Concierge.
Chris: My godfather was a vascular surgeon in a teaching hospital, and we've talked about that a lot — how it's like, "I haven't done this procedure in a while, could I get another person in here to consult, get a second set of eyes?" Some knowledge that can help, even if it's not a person.
Jackie: Yeah — "I've got to have this difficult conversation with the client, is there a manager who's been in a similar situation, can we do some role-playing?" We practice on that.
Chris: Sure.
Jackie: So we're developing that, and we're growing at HRP. The launch of these programs really highlights the soft skills, the managerial skills, the teamwork and cross-team skills. It's a little bit more weekly because you're talking about soft skills, but one of the things that's been critical so far is that it's got to be in person — you've got to know the people you work with, trust the people you work with.
Chris: These different programs — like a week? How long are they?
Jackie: A day or two — concentrated.
Chris: Yeah, but you want to build connection within these cohorts as part of the goal.
Jackie: Exactly. We try to schedule the 101 class right before our holiday party. Currently at HRP, if you work here, you and your spouse can fly to Connecticut for the holiday party, covered by HRP — we have a travel stipend so everybody can participate regardless of office. So 101 happens around the holiday party, and there's a big annual meeting at the same time, so people get immersed in several aspects of our culture all at once. The 201 is similarly scheduled around a couple of big activities, so it further meshes folks into our structures.
Chris: That makes me think — one of the big conversations in our LMS beta is, just because you can make it digital doesn't mean you should, and navigating when to do which. This sounds like — I'm inferring — the goal of 101 is more about culture, immersion, and connection than the actual literal knowledge transfer in those sessions.
Jackie: A hundred percent, correct. And you're right, there's definitely a place for the digital aspect — that comes back to knowing the what, the why, doing the who-what-when-where-why-how. And if the digital platform makes sense based on those considerations, great. We're part of the beta of your LMS, and that's going to aid in many of our trainings where it's the education piece, building the awareness, tracking who's actually done it. It scratches an itch for several of our topics, but it's not going to be appropriate for all of them.
Chris: Absolutely. I'd even think there's some things in 101 and 201 you cover in person — again, the goal is connection, not competence — but maybe people need it again six months later, and from a recall perspective it makes sense to also have it available digitally.
Jackie: Correct, correct.
Chris: You started by talking about the two hats you wear, internal and external focus. What does it feel like to be pulled between those two areas? What are the challenges of developing people while also serving clients, and how do you navigate that tension?
Jackie: I'd say it's a healthy tension, not an unhealthy one — because if there wasn't an aspect of my job where I was still interacting with clients, how would I know how to develop our people to better interact with them?
Chris: If you're not up on the mountain anymore, how do you know?
Jackie: Right, right. There's a reason why in the A&E industry we call it "practice" — it's always evolving, and the issues front and center in our clients' minds when I entered consulting almost 20 years ago are very different from the issues front and center today. If I didn't dance on both sides of that line, I think it would be very difficult to do the job. I think where the tension becomes unhealthy is — and I'm sure every company struggles with this — we try to highlight, only work on something that only you can do. If you're working on something you can push down to team members so they can get more experience and sharpen those skills, push it down. If somebody else in the organization can do it, you have to ask yourself, are you being a good steward of the company's time?
Chris: Man.
Jackie: And oh my god, that's the hardest thing — I bomb at it sometimes. It's human nature, you focus on what needs to be done, not on whether you should be the one doing it. That's where the tension becomes unhealthy — when you let the client side drive your task instead of remembering, yes, I'm here to serve the client, but am I the right person to serve this, or do I need to push it down to somebody more in the practice? Is there going to be somebody better for this job, not only because of the client but because of the organization? It's not important that I know how to do this — it's important that our team knows how to do this. Sometimes you just get so busy that momentum or inertia takes over, and you've got to stop it and push down as much as possible. That's an integral part of anybody's training program — push down work, don't push up work. We don't need to develop the folks already in the leadership chairs — we need succession planning. We need to always be thinking, who's the next person going into that project management role, that practice leader role, that other role? And if you look around and there's nobody there, that's not an indication that your staff isn't good — it's an indication that you haven't developed your staff. And that only happens by pushing down work. That's where the tension becomes negative — when you get focused on the task and not the goal.
Chris: I just interviewed Kent Jonasen for episode nine — he's part of the Leadership Pipeline Institute, and they have two books, the Leadership Pipeline and the Specialist Pipeline. I'd really recommend both. The thing he talked about that you just touched on is, when you move from leading yourself to leading others to leading leaders, there's a whole series of turns you need to take in your career, and most companies don't talk about the loss — how much that job is going to change. You got kudos, feedback, more pay because you got really good at doing this thing; now in this new job, you have to start almost from scratch, because that's not your job anymore — your job is to get other people good at doing that thing.
Jackie: Correct — it's the disease of taking your last job with you as you go up. You've got to do the job you have, or the job you want, not the job you had.
Chris: As we get toward the end here, I'm curious — you've hinted at some of it — what are your hopes and dreams for learning and development at HRP? If we're talking in two or three years and you've had a great run, what's different?
Jackie: Magic wand moment — I would love to see that skills development program in action. We've identified, across all our practices and disciplines, whether business support or technical, fully fleshed out: you're entering this role, here are the five things you've got to be able to do in the first year, here are the seven things in subsequent years. We've got that rolling, certified trainers, evolving, growing.
Chris: And you have a system to keep track of it too?
Jackie: Correct, correct.
Chris: That's something you've told me is so challenging — to keep track of all that.
Jackie: Correct. Once we have that, we'll have a good handle. We're still at a size where we know who has what skills and competencies — my practice has roughly 25 people, so pretty easy to keep a handle on. Company-wide we're 135, 140, technical and business support combined. Even at those numbers we have a good handle, but we're growing, and there's going to be a point where it's not sustainable to just say, "oh yeah, I know so-and-so" — we need the infrastructure in place. We're developing that structured checkoff process and documentation, because at some point we need to be able to pull up a database and see — we might remember two of the seven people with the skills off the top of our heads, but we need that visual. I envision pulling up on HIKE the skills matrix: we have this job in this location requiring this many people — let's pull it up. We've got these seven people we can send, these three people still building their competency, let's pair this person with that person for the project so we can build them up. It's going to be a lot less subjective because it'll be right there in front of us.
Chris: Versus going off what's in people's heads and trying their best.
Jackie: Correct — or sending this person because they happen to be in that office, whether they're the right person or not. So looking into the future, magic wand moment, I'd love for that to be our reality. And from a business continuity and sustainable operations standpoint, it's also going to highlight where our weaknesses are — where we have a thin bench, where we've got just one person who can do something. If it's a mission-critical task, we'll be able to easily and visibly share with leadership, hey, this is mission-critical, we only have one person who can do this, we need to invest in outside training. There's some cost there, but when you have it all in front of you, it supports the decision-making process and helps identify risk, identify opportunities, and form a more sustainable organization.
Chris: I'll circle back to the beginning, where you said people are the product and learning is the innovation. The scenario you just described is a form of product management — you're able to visualize it, see your strengths and weaknesses, rather than what people are carrying around in their heads, and make investments accordingly. I love that. Jackie, thank you so much for coming on and spending time with me.
Jackie: Thanks for having me.
Chris: This is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to watching this journey evolve at HRP.
Jackie: Yeah, great. Well, you're all a part of the journey too. We're really excited about the LMS and using that to help us get to that next level.
Chris: Amazing. All right, thank you.
Jackie: Yep, thank you.