Redesigning Learning for the Next Generation of AEC Talent | Dan Hottinger and Kari Shonblom of BWBR

In this episode of the Smarter by Design podcast, I’m joined by Dan Hottinger, Principal and Director of Professional Services at BWBR, and Kari Shonblom, Knowledge Manager at BWBR, for a deep conversation about how their firm is redesigning learning to meet the realities of today’s AEC industry and the expectations of the next generation of talent.

Dan and Kari take us inside BWBR’s Landmark Learning program, a decade-long effort to help emerging professionals build judgment, confidence, and technical fluency faster than experience alone would allow. We explore how BWBR uses quality assurance (QA) and construction administration (CA) feedback loops to identify recurring gaps in practice, translate real project issues into targeted learning, and continuously evolve what and how the firm teaches technical skills to emerging professionals.

Along the way, we talk about how learning itself is changing. As the next generation of AEC professionals has grown up searching first, watching short-form videos, and expecting knowledge on demand, BWBR is rethinking traditional training models. Dan and Kari share how the firm is experimenting with shorter, more focused content while preserving the value of longer, story-driven sessions where context, judgment, and tacit knowledge can be shared.

The conversation also explores a hybrid approach to learning: pairing on-demand resources with live discussion, designing learning paths that evolve across career stages, and connecting technical instruction with the softer skills—such as communication, leadership, and decision-making—that become critical over time. At the center of it all is a simple but demanding idea: learning only matters if it shows up as improvement in the work.

This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how learning, QA, and career development can be woven into a single system that allows BWBR to develop talent from within, adapt to changing expectations, and build resilient expertise over time.

If you’re thinking about how your AEC firm can redesign learning for a new generation, connect knowledge management to real project outcomes, or move beyond training as a one-off event, this conversation is for you.

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📃 Episode Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Chris: Kari and Dan, welcome to Smarter By Design.

Dan: Thank you for having us, Chris.

Kari: Hi. Thank you.

Chris: I’m a big fan of both of yours—and a big fan of BWBR. We’ve been working together for well over a decade at this point. There are a lot of things I like about BWBR, and we’ll touch on a few of them today, but I want to start with Landmark Learning.

Dan, this program you and your colleague Stef Trzpuc shared at KA Connect 2017 really stuck with people. It’s been referenced a lot in our community. For those who don’t know about it, can you go back to the beginning and tell us what Landmark Learning is, how it got started, and what it looks like today?

Dan: Yeah. It’s really our program for bringing in and working with emerging professionals—to teach them up and get them further along in their career faster.

Landmark Learning was born out of a necessity to take a five-year architect and make them a ten-year architect quicker. How do you do that?

The first thing you do is get buy-in from leadership. Once you get that support, you go. Over time, we’ve evolved Landmark Learning into a number of different things. But its core thing is always the teaching of the architectonics—how to put a building together, how to work with clients and consultants, all of those things that often take years and years of experience to do.

We want to bring in the experts and the “nexperts” to teach people to do those things sooner, quicker in their career, and get them to a point where they’re comfortable doing it.

Chris: Is the target audience people with around five years of experience, or do you go earlier than that?

Dan: We do emerging professionals all the way out to about five, six years in the career. But we also use it for people who join BWBR.

You might be five years along in your career. Maybe you’re six, seven, eight years along in your career, but we still ask you to be within the Landmark Learning group because there are a lot of times that we talk about processes we have at BWBR. We talk about how to coordinate with your specification writer. We talk about handing your project off to the construction administrator—what our quality assurance process is and what our expectations of you are as you’re working on projects.

So it’s a larger group, but we do try to catch as many people as possible. Maybe a person who’s been in their career for eight years doesn’t need to stay as long, but we do have a requirement: if you are five years or less in your career, you have to attend and watch a certain number of sessions per year.

Chris: Give me a sense of how this works structurally. Is this weekly? Monthly? How many sessions per year? How many people attend? And how much of it is live versus on demand?

Dan: Sure. We do about 16 to 18 a year, depending on schedules.

We originally did around 22, but we scaled back because we now have a large library of recorded content.

All of the sessions are live, and we run them on Zoom. We’ve talked about going back to in-person, but honestly, Zoom allows us to reach a much larger audience. When we were in person, we had about 22 to 24 attendees. On Zoom, we regularly get 40 to 50 people. It’s simply more accessible.

We record every session and post it to our intranet. That way, anyone who is interested—even outside the Landmark group—can watch them. It also helps people who have been here longer and may feel the program is exclusionary. This gives them access to the same learning.

Kari: We even had to go through an exercise last year because the group—the invite list—was getting a bit too big. Dan had to cull it down. People sort of graduated out of it, but you still had several people reaching out and asking to stay on the list.

Chris: Now that it’s virtual, what’s the downside of having the list be too big?

Dan: If you are on the list, you’re allowed a certain amount of hours per year to watch videos—any back video that you want to watch—and put it on your time card. So we give everybody 24 hours to watch videos or go to Landmark sessions. We feel that’s adequate.

But when Kari says we had to pare down the list, we had like 160 people on it. Once you got on, you never got off. So we started thinking: is that even right? You’ve got to remember, we’ve been doing this for 10 years. Some of the people in the original group were still on there—and they’re project managers now. They’re not coming to them.

So when you look at it and you say, this person is moving towards being a principal, this person is working as a project manager, maybe this person zigged in their career and they’re writing specifications now—these are people that are more of the experts. I want them teaching the course, not just coming to them.

So we went through and started culling down the list. But Kari’s right: there were some people who—even though they’re project managers—were upset about being taken off.

Chris: Because they lost their ability to build those specific learning hours?

Dan: Not so much. They just wanted to come to the session. You only get the invite if you’re on the list.

We let everybody know what we were doing. We didn’t just drop people off the list. If you were one of those people, I sent you an email saying, “Just so you know, you’re not going to be on the list anymore. There is an appeal process if you would like to send an appeal to remain on there.”

We got about 12 or 15 people that wanted to stay on, so we said, “Let’s just keep them all.”

Chris: That says something about the value you’re creating. If they didn’t find it useful, they wouldn’t have pushed to remain.

I’m curious—people who are further along in their careers are still attending sessions about door schedules, QA/QC, codes. Do they feel like they have gaps in their knowledge, or is it more about continuous learning?

Dan: I’ll give you an example. Susan Goldberg is one of the people who wanted to stay on the list. She’s an excellent project manager, very well respected. In her appeal, she said that while she doesn’t attend every session, the ones she does attend always teach her something valuable.

She also wanted to hear what her teams were hearing. Often, a team member will say, “In Landmark Learning we learned this,” and the project manager might not have known that had become a standard. So it helps them stay aligned with expectations.

Kari: From attending these live, without fail, there are always great anecdotes from Dan. You get the rich storytelling.

And more experienced people like Susan will often chime in with a real-world experience or anecdote of their own—say, “Here’s a slightly different take,” or “Here’s what I’ve seen.” That’s super valuable.

There’s always discussion, questions, interjections that add value and make it a much richer experience.

Chris: Is there a market there that you’re missing? For people like Susan who don’t want all of the things but some of the things—do you think there’s another program or a more elevated version? I’m curious how you’ve responded to that.

Kari: We’ve talked about that. The Landmark program targets a specific cohort, but the topics span a wide range. I’ve been thinking about it as three tracks: technical software skills, role-specific technical skills, and soft skills.

We’re finding that as technology and AI make technical information easier to find, emerging professionals need more support with soft skills—how to call someone and ask a question, how to be direct, how to build relationships.

As the content shifts more toward soft skills, it naturally becomes relevant to a broader audience.

Dan: This past year we focused heavily on soft skills. Kari did a great session on difficult conversations. Afterward, I thought, “This would be perfect for our project managers,” so we adapted it and ran it for that group as well.

When a topic has crossover appeal, we try to reuse it with other groups. Sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes it’s expanded, but soft skills in particular are relevant to everyone.

Kari: For that session, we tailored examples for emerging professionals versus project managers, which made it more impactful. It was like taking the content on a small road show.

Chris: I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. The program used to run about 22 sessions a year and now it’s more like 16. One reason you gave for that was the growing library of recorded content.

If I’m an emerging professional in the Landmark program, am I expected to only attend the live sessions, or is there also an expectation that I’ll go back and watch certain recorded sessions as part of a curriculum?

Dan: It’s more of a hybrid curriculum. We record every session and post it on our intranet, and anyone in the firm can access those recordings.

That said, we’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. This year I’ll hit 200 sessions. At one point I joked that after 100 episodes, shouldn’t I get syndication rates?

Chris: Right. A million dollars an episode, like Friends towards the end of the run.

Dan: Apparently, not. 

But what we realized, especially through Kari’s work, is that curation has become a real challenge. For example, we have four separate sessions on door hardware. Door hardware continues to be a problem area in our QA tracking, so we revisit it every few years to try to make it stick.

Now imagine you’re a new emerging professional and someone tells you, “Go watch the door hardware video.” Which one do you watch? That’s one of our biggest challenges—making sure people are accessing the most current and relevant version of the content.

Chris: Kari, that’s interesting because many firms struggle with not having enough knowledge captured. You’re dealing with the opposite problem—having too much. How are you thinking about that?

Kari: When I inherited the Landmark Learning page on our intranet, it was one very long table—session number, description, video link, PDF link—with the newest sessions at the top.

People weren’t scrolling all the way down. Now that AI search surfaces everything we’ve ever posted, people are finding multiple versions of the same topic without knowing which one is correct.

Digital hygiene is top of mind for me now. If we update something, we need to remove outdated content. I need to understand what people are producing and then search for what already exists so we’re not duplicating or confusing things.

As we look toward Synthesis LMS, categorization is huge. We never really categorized these sessions—they were driven by whatever issues were surfacing at the time. Going forward, I’d love to take older but still relevant sessions and break them down.

Instead of asking someone to sit through an hour-long video, we could run the transcript through AI, pull out bullet points, and create a cheat sheet or quick reference. That’s much easier to consume.

Chris: When did you start Landmark Learning—what year?

Dan: The third week of February 2016.

Chris: So you’re almost at a decade. When you got started, my memory is: you were spending time with the CA team and they were seeing the same issues show up again and again in drawings, and that drove the curriculum.

Now that you’re almost a decade in, is that still how you decide what to teach?

Dan: It’s evolved, but that feedback loop is still core. We regularly talk to the construction administrators and ask what they’re seeing. We just finished what we call CA grading, where we ask the CA team to give us a letter grade across 16 categories.

This year we added a question about how well project teams are handing projects off to CA. We were getting C-level grades, so we created a checklist to help teams improve that handoff.

When I report out to the firm, I use that data to explain why we’re making certain changes. We also include comments from the CA team, both positive and negative, so people understand what’s really happening in the field.

Chris: You were getting a C in handoff from the CA team?

Dan: Yeah. Ranging from D-plus to C.

They can also add commentary. I use interesting comments—good or bad—in our annual BWBR forum session. And we give CA folks a chance to expound on why they graded it that way.

Now, to create the loop, you have to check it against something. In our VantagePoint system, we have QA tracking. We ask our QA reviewers to grade the exact same 16 categories. We track that data.

It gives us useful things, like: how much time should I schedule for a QA review? I can tell you: if you have a CD set, you need 18 minutes per sheet—that’s based on our data.

We can also track consultants—who’s good and who’s not. We let consultants know we’re tracking performance. Underperforming ones get a phone call from me.

And principals come to me: “I’ve got these proposals from three mechanical/electrical firms—who’s best?” I can tell them. We can cut it by market: healthcare, S&T, higher ed. Some firms are better at certain things than others.

So we track all of that to give principals data to make educated decisions.

Chris: So the feedback loop is CA grading, QA tracking, and then it informs what you’re going to teach next year.

Dan: Exactly. The CA grades and QA grades are very similar, and we also incorporated proposal request tracking: what are we changing out in the field? What are we issuing change orders for?

So we have three items you can compare: before we issued, what was the problem; out in the field, what was the problem; and what are we changing in the field. When you compare that data, certain things rise to the top all the time.

That’s what we use to inform what we talk about.

We also have a workshop every year where we ask: “What do you want to learn about?” That’s where we got a lot of the soft skills topics.

So there’s the data, there’s “what do you want to learn,” and there are things we go backwards on and say, “We need to pull this out, dust it off, and do it again.”

Chris: Kari, I’m glad we’re talking over a 10-year span because it gives us a chance to learn from it.

There’s individual learning for emerging professionals, but there’s also BWBR learning as an organization. Do you spend time measuring whether Landmark is creating better outcomes? How does that come together?

Kari:  I think so, but it’s complicated. We’re always going to have emerging professionals who are brand new to this work, regardless of how good the program is. They’re going to make mistakes while they learn.

What I keep coming back to is whether we can reduce how time-intensive this is by shifting some of the learning off the live sessions. With the LMS coming online, could some of this become off-the-shelf learning?

For example, there are foundational things that everyone needs to know when they start. Could we assign the top 10 things that every new hire should learn and then pair that with live sessions focused on discussion and application?

The challenge is that people don’t know what they don’t know. Door hardware is a great example. The content exists on Synthesis. It’s searchable. But people don’t know they should be searching for it in the first place. 

Chris: Right now it’s not assigned. Someone has to decide to go look for it.

Kari: They’d have to know to go look for it. They’d have to know that it’s a gap in their knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Dan notices we’re slipping, and we need refresher. But it seems like something foundational—you just need to learn it. It doesn’t necessarily need to come up in a live session.

We can make live sessions more interactive. People don’t necessarily want to be lectured at. They want hands-on learning.

Chris: I feel confident saying difficult conversations probably benefits from discussion. That’s one where maybe you watch something in advance, but you also want reps, role play, scenarios, stories.

So are there topics you can shift to on-demand, and then reserve live for the ones that really benefit from social learning?

Dan: Yeah. Kari and I have talked about this a lot. Are there 10 or 12 sessions that should just be assigned to everyone when they start at BWBR?

The challenge is deciding which ones. If you ask our building technology and standards group, they’ll tell you it needs to be 20 sessions. That’s just not realistic.

Ideally, we’d pair this with some kind of quiz or validation so we know people actually absorbed the content. That way, we don’t have to keep repeating the same topics live year after year.

Kari: We’ve also talked about systematizing it more.

Dan is a master at feedback loops. You asked how to know whether somebody is absorbing the learning and if it’s making a difference.

I think it comes up in annual reviews. He’s talking to project managers. He’s trying to understand how the team is doing, who’s struggling, who can you give a task to and know they’ll accomplish it without extra support. That becomes visible quickly.

You can’t fake knowing something. Either you’re absorbing it and applying the skills, or you’re not.

Chris: That’s interesting because someone might have 20 topics they think everyone should know, but depending on what phase you’re in, you might need some of it more than others.

If you’re in schematic design, do you need door hardware? Probably not. But if you take it and never apply it on a project, retention is low.

I kind of look at the future of learning like air traffic control: route the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. You have knowledge assets, and people in different phases of career and projects—how do you land the plane on the right runway?

Kari: As you know, our project lifecycle work could be a way to insert some of these trainings along that lifecycle. It could pop up as a suggestion. If you’re experienced, ignore it. If you’re less experienced, you can say: “I’m at this point on this type of project—what should I have done? What questions should I ask the client by now?”

A more robust checklist. Not that you’re checking items off, but a reminder: make sure you’ve done these things.

I’m seeing emerging professionals want to be more self-sufficient. They want to search, find the answer, do the task. They don’t necessarily want to stop and have a long conversation. Or they’re too scared to go talk to people—it’s not their style. They want to be more independent.

Dan: Work styles are different now. There’s a lot of “I want to pick up my phone and Google it.” AI will come up with 10 answers, but knowing what’s good and bad is the struggle.

Face-to-face discussions can be hard. I like to walk around and ask people: “Are you struggling with anything? What are you working on right now?” Just to get a feel for how they feel.

I also meet with every project manager once a month: “How is your team doing? Is anybody struggling? Anybody who could use help?” We address it person by person if we have to. We’re trying to make people succeed.

Chris: Historically it’s been hour-long recorded sessions. A lot of people are moving towards shorter, on-demand native content. Is that something you’re experimenting with?

Dan: I’ve been talking to Kari about this. My son is in his early twenties—his whole life is five-minute videos on YouTube.

We went to a Renaissance festival. He’s watching a glassblower and explaining glass blowing to me. I said, “How do you know about glass blowing?” He said, “I watched it on YouTube.”

So I told Kari: maybe we do “Landmark shorts”—five to eight minute videos on very small topics. Then with AI search, a person can grab those shorts for the specific thing they want to know, rather than wading through 15, 20, 30 minutes to find it.

Chris: Are those standalone topics, or do you break an hour into six shorts, or do they stitch together into learning paths?

Kari: I think we’re open to where the content takes us. 

I have a meeting next week with an expert—just going to interview them on Zoom for an hour about one specific topic: how they approach it, what mental processing they do, what they’d tell someone if asked.

I don’t know if we’ll end up with short videos, or a series, or maybe it’s not video at all—maybe it’s a checklist: “At this point, cover these five things. Ask these five questions.”

I’m open to both: freestanding shorts or chunks you string together.

Chris: This sounds like a platform shift—not just an incremental upgrade from in-person recordings to Zoom recordings—but a rethink of how you deliver learning.

Kari: I think so.

Dan: For now, maybe it’s a combination: shorts on BHive plus live sessions for longer, deeper dives.

We have to be nimble—not only to the people coming in, but to better ways of doing what we teach. Nobody wants the same 16 things every year. We need to stay on the edge of what they need, and make sure the style of learning fits the group.

Kari: There’s always a place for longer format because that’s where you have discussion and real stories.

If we go back to door hardware—Dan showed me a picture from a presentation with the most complicated door I’ve ever seen. Conduits, buttons, looks like it will send you to outer space.

And he’s talking about all the questions you need to ask: what happens when you open it? Does it notify someone when you swipe a key card? Does it also turn on the lights? Does it notify security? All these things someone may not think about when they’re just putting in a door with a swing direction based on code.

Chris: Not all doors are created equal.

Kari: Definitely not.

Chris: You’ve got four recordings over the years on door hardware. As you modernize how you teach it, do you imagine older recordings go away and get combined into one gold standard you keep updated? How are you thinking about unlearning as well as learning?

Dan: I’ll change the example: mechanical, engineering, and plumbing coordination—we’ve done that three times too. A consistently hard area.

When we were going through the 200 videos, Kari provided me a trash bin—drag and drop ones we don’t want to see again. I dumped the ones that were too old.

I wish I’d curated better earlier. There were so many times someone would say, “Wouldn’t it be great if Landmark did a subject like this?” And I’d say, “We did.” Then I’d try to find it on the page and I couldn’t.

I use fun titles: trash enclosures I called “Trash and Treasures.” But if you don’t know what that means, you don’t know what to look for.

Kari: One of my favorites was “Me, Myself, and I: Small Projects.”

Dan: Exactly. If I can’t find it, no one else can either. So over the next year, we’re really focused on better curation—cleaner naming, better metadata, and making everything more findable.

Kari: We’re also retroactively adding metadata so people can filter content by project type, phase, technology, or role. Right now, you have to know exactly what you’re searching for.

We had an emerging professional say to classmates, “How do you know all this stuff?” And he said, “We have this great thing at my firm—like our own personal YouTube.” He explored and found it helpful, but that took initiative. We want the structure to support exploration better.

Chris: Not everyone will self-direct at that level. So there’s curation, better metadata in LMS/Synthesis, maybe “essentials” for new staff, and then project-type or phase-based learning. And you’re exploring BWBR shorts.

Dan: When you put it that way, it sounds overwhelming, but you’re basically right. We’ve done a great job putting together content and an okay job putting it somewhere accessible.

Chris: What about people who’ve been at BWBR longer—more than five years? Is there less need there, or are we just not talking about it?

Kari: Yes, definitely. Landmark Learning has been a catalyst. We now have other upskilling programs for specific market sectors. For example, if someone is new to healthcare or behavioral health, there’s a series of upskilling videos that walk through that project type and the common issues you’ll encounter.

Another area we’re thinking about more intentionally is mid-level staff—how do we prepare people for leadership roles? That’s heavily focused on soft skills. You need technical mastery, but you also need to learn how to mentor others, communicate clearly, and manage teams.

Once people step into leadership roles, there’s still learning to do. Things like self-awareness, communication styles, and how to get the best out of your teams don’t stop being relevant once you get promoted.

Chris: There’s a book you might like: The Leadership Pipeline. It goes through predictable turns from individual contributor to managing a team, to managing a market.

The author also wrote a newer book called The Specialist Pipeline—more about technical contributor routes and how to create career opportunities for people who want to specialize.

Dan: I’d be interested in reading that.

Chris: I’ll send it over and put it in the show notes.

Kari: But sort of the converse of that specialist topic: this program living past Dan’s retirement. If Dan wins the lottery tomorrow and leaves to travel the world, so much of the success of Landmark Learning is tied to who Dan is as a person.

Dan is exceptional at getting feedback, hearing what people are really saying, and cutting through noise to identify the root problem. He genuinely wants to help people succeed. That’s hard to replicate.

He’s talked before about making himself a Swiss Army knife—experiencing every part of the business so he could be useful everywhere. That’s harder to do now as firms get bigger and roles become more specialized.

Chris: There’s the skills and systems and knowledge, but it’s also care. It’s hard to tell someone to care more. Finding people who can do the thing and also have that gut-level drive—even with resistance, deadlines, obstacles—that’s part of the challenge.

Dan: In 2017, the question was: how do you find the time? My response was: it has to be a passion project. You have to care.

We’ve always been a firm where we do a lot of “draft and develop”—in the NFL they call it that. We’ve found success in that.

Chris: By that you mean: you bring people out of school and grow them at BWBR versus poaching a 20-year person.

Dan: Exactly. And 2022 and 2023 demonstrated that clearly. Sometimes we had to back up and unlearn bad habits from people coming in from other firms.

Kari: For context: 2022–2023 because we onboarded a significant number of staff.

Dan: I think we’re better served bringing people out of school, teaching them how to do the job the way we want, serving clients the way we want, with buildings built the way we want.

Chris: It connects back to Landmark Learning. If you’re draft-and-develop, getting the first five years right matters.

Dan: Absolutely.

Kari: And we’re a rigorous firm—not rigid, but we have processes in place so we don’t reinvent every time. If you know what’s expected, you can go do it.

Part of the secret sauce of Landmark is the robust QA process Dan put in place to support it. I asked him what came first, Landmark or QA. He said Landmark came first, but he needed a way to prove it was working.

So now we’re getting feedback from QA, CA, PR requests. He needed the QA process with defined checkpoints, and we make people sign off to enforce they’re happening.

If somebody starts a program like this, it can feel daunting. People will push back: “I don’t want to do data entry, who’s going to do that?”

We were lucky enough to have a person configure the technology, and Dan got the CA team and QA team on board. He’s been able to show value: scheduling the right time for QA review, staffing for QA, and so on.

Dan: I want to clarify that we’ve always had a QA process. What Kari is talking about is the modern, formalized QA system.

Also, Kari, I appreciate that you didn’t use the term “flit about” this time.

Kari: I was trying to compliment Dan and said it the wrong way. Dan is intentional about walking around, stopping at desks, catching up, seeing what people are working on. Opportunities come out of those conversations.

I see him like a pollinator of knowledge and relationships. I said he’s like a butterfly, flittering about the office—sprinkling good conversations and building morale. And he never let me live it down.

Chris: My dad called it “management by walking around.” Taking the pulse, seeing what people are doing.

But this connects to critical knowledge transfer: Dan has skills that make the machine go. Systems help—Deltek, data—but there’s also culture: getting people to actually do the things.

I hope you don’t retire soon, Dan. I want to see what you do through this replatforming.

Kari: I selfishly want him to stay forever too. I was in the audience at KA Connect 2017. I didn’t work with Dan. It was my first KA Connect. I didn’t know Stef. They presented and I thought, “They’re doing awesome stuff.”

Dan said a line on stage: “We don’t have 20 years to train the 20-year architect anymore.” That stuck with me. I’ve been a fan since then.

I emailed it to everyone at my old firm: “We’ve got to be doing stuff like this.” But it can be daunting if you don’t have the personality. You can’t just declare tracking and sessions if you don’t have the passion to orchestrate it.

Chris: Dan, if you gave that quote today, do you feel it’s even more acute? Buildings are more complex, tech faster, people stepping up sooner, fewer Gen Xers than boomers—so millennials and Gen Z have to step up sooner.

Dan: Yes. Learning styles are different. It’s a two-direction teaching path now.

I need to talk to senior PAs and PMs and talk them through what they need to do. I like the Jerry McGuire line: “Help me help you.” These are the things you need to do with your emerging professionals. They’re not going to call you. Give direct feedback. Be granular. Coach them.

On the other side, you also need to teach emerging professionals how to receive constructive criticism. Soft skills.

Software-wise, they are so much farther ahead than we were 10 years ago coming out of school. They know the software. They do tasks ridiculously fast. Maybe it’s not perfect, but they can do it.

We also try to track interests. If Kari wants to work on medical projects, we direct efforts into that as much as possible.

You have to pay more attention, be more intentional, more nimble. If something’s not working, try something else.

Chris: Smarter by Design is about designing our businesses as much as we design buildings.

It sounds like the traditional apprenticeship model has problems now. Between complexity, speed, hybrid work, and sheer knowledge load—maybe it’s not “learn everything through osmosis over 20 years,” but “learn how to find and apply the right knowledge on demand.”

Essentials first, then upskilling for project types, and flexibility.

Dan: First, the apprenticeship model is dead. It’s not going to work.

We have conversations with someone out of school for six months and they’re like, “How come I’m not going to interviews? How come I’m not in every meeting? How come I’m not running the construction meeting?”

That expectation is way higher. I never would have dared say that early in my career. I knew I had to learn—do stairs, then wall sections, details. That mindset isn’t there anymore.

They want to be as important to the project as possible right now. And I get it.

Chris: Where do you think that comes from? Some would say “entitled,” but maybe it’s ambition.

Dan: Twofold. Ambition is part of it. It’s Instagram culture—people want to be visible and important right away. That’s not just online; it’s in the firm.

But it’s also an immediate gratification culture: you order anything on Amazon and it shows up the next day. People expect immediacy.

Those conversations are difficult because it’s hard to say: you’re not leading because you don’t have the expertise. We don’t take you to the interview because only presenters go.

And leadership and PMs worry those conversations feel counterproductive, because people want to be the person teams want to work for. Teams want support. They want to feel their career is being advanced. So managing expectations can feel risky.

Chris: Many people also don’t want a hazing ritual of “I did it this way, so you have to.”

Dan: I despise “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” or “you have to do it this way because I had to.”

During COVID I was upset and said, “If people would just put a couple more hours into their week… I had to work 65, 70 hours just to get noticed.”

My son didn’t even look up and said, “So because it sucked for you, it has to suck for everybody?” That stuck with me. He was totally right.

So we’ve talked about how to break that cycle. People want work-life balance now, and I get it. I wish I’d had more of that. I don’t want people to have to experience what I experienced.

Kari: And you do a good job of setting expectations.

I think the higher expectations come from multiple things: on-demand culture, faster educational pathways, and seeing peers in other industries advance faster. In architecture, licensure takes years. You can’t always advance as quickly.

Chris: We’re also seeing firms write down role profiles and progression paths more transparently so expectations are clearer. Dan, you’re chuckling.

Dan: We did exactly that. We spent a lot of time on role profiles—creating a ladder. People want to be architect one, two, three, four, and move up.

But when you write it down, people say, “I’ve met the requirements, I should be an architect three now.” So now we’re having those conversations.

Chris: What’s the missing piece—capability versus opportunity?

Kari: It’s the firm need. There has to be a match between “yes, you have the skills” and “we have enough need for that role on enough projects.” It’s a staffing reality.

Chris: Right—four quarterbacks on the depth chart, one on the field.

So what does BWBR look like as a learning organization in 2030, if it goes really well?

Kari: Continuing all the great stuff past Dan’s retirement—building resilience. Trying to distill the secret sauce. Finding folks with the soft skills and passion.

And how do you identify potential earlier without trial and error? How do you know who’s great in an interview until you send them to an interview?

We were talking about SMMA—Ryan posted about using an AI assistant for presentation training, and it was enlightening. We should do more of that for leader training: dealing with team issues, delivering difficult conversations, managing expectations.

Dan: Is there a way through AI—looking at what people are searching for—to identify intent?

If Kari is searching all the medical stuff—modalities, imaging—she clearly wants medical. We should steer her. Can we identify future leaders, future medical planners, and direct energy there to fill future gaps?

Kari: And capitalizing on ambitious folks would be great.

Also: beyond technical training—how do we upskill creativity? Design thinking? It can feel innate, but how do we help people elevate creative thinking? In a world where AI automates technical tasks, human creativity may be what sets us apart.

Chris: Looking back at nearly 10 years of Landmark, what’s something you’ve changed your mind on?

Dan: When I started, I thought a solid learning program could address any need. “We have a problem here; we fix it through learning.” Any high school teacher would laugh.

I didn’t take into account that learning styles change and the world changes.

Pre-pandemic, we were in a room, elbow to elbow. Then COVID hit—we had to retool and teach people how to do architecture remotely. Learn Zoom. Learn meeting etiquette. Noise cancellation didn’t exist yet. Dogs in the room. Little things.

Then hybrid: what are the rules for internal meetings, client meetings? So we had to zig and zag with the times.

Back in 2017 I thought, “This is easy.” I wish I’d told myself: you’re going to have to morph.

Kari: For me, not specific to Landmark but learning in general: it’s okay to be less formal and less polished.

With AI tools, we can do more with less. I’m trying to take pressure off people: if you want to document something, just have a conversation with me. We’ll record it. We can use AI to get valuable content without a lot of prep or a big presentation.

Chris: Underneath “more with less” is speed. Things are moving faster and learning windows are shorter, so you can’t be precious.

Final question: advice for firms just getting started on formal learning?

Dan: Just start. If you sit around trying to make the perfect program, you’ll work on it forever. Go, and dial it in as you go.

Every firm has different needs. Be nimble.

Over time, it becomes normalized—part of culture. In interviews, emerging professionals ask if we have continuing ed. We say yes, and it’s a benefit that helps attract good candidates.

Durability comes with persistence. Apathy is death to your learning program. The minute you say, “I’m too busy, I can’t do it, we’ll cancel,” and you do that enough times, your program starts to die.

Chris: That lands. Learning is often non-urgent but important. If it’s connected to quality and outcomes, it’s easier to keep showing up.

Dan: It’s important to me as a person, and to the firm. There’s pride in making it what it can be.

You develop project partners: Kari and I talk about learning, we talk to Elise, digital practice folks, Andrew. Everything’s a partnership. That helps.

Also: be open to outside considerations. This is not a pride project. It has to be a passion, not “I own this.” When I finally let Stef in, the process improvements she suggested were things I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of. It helped the whole thing.

Kari: My advice: be okay with a smaller sphere of influence in the beginning. Go where the water’s flowing.

If you try to go too big too fast, you run into naysayers: “We can’t do this, we can’t change that.” Start small, build momentum, show ROI, and then grow.

Chris: That’s fantastic. Thank you both for joining me and sharing your knowledge. I always get inspired every time I talk to you, and today was no different. I’m looking forward to sharing this with our community. Thanks again.

Kari: Thanks, Chris.

Dan: Thank you, Chris.