Strong continuing-education programs add to the bottom line as firm culture and skills from basic to advanced are shared and institutionally saved. Service and product providers offer continuing education to clients as a way to build trust and, thereby, market share. Here are three examples from this year’s AIA Continuing Education System Awards for Excellence.

Large Firm—Over 100 Employees Category
Gresham, Smith & Partners

Education is the vehicle through which improvement is accomplished, stated the submission from Gresham, Smith & Partners. The firm, with 13 offices in 10 states, counts its major markets as health-care, corporate, aviation, transportation, environmental, and planning. Founded as a two-architect partnership in 1967, the firm has grown to more than 600 employees.

In 1996, during a strategic planning initiative, the partners of GS&P decided to address the fragmented and inconsistent continuing-education (CE) program across the firm, which at the time depended primarily on outside CE providers. With education identified as a strategic initiative, one of the senior partners took charge of the firm’s CE development.

Turning first to outside consultants, the firm conducted a focus group of office mangers, lead principals, and partners to fix where they were and where they hoped to go. This group developed the firm’s Learning Objectives and Organizing Principles. Underlying those principles is the goal that “Gresham, Smith and Partners will be the best consultant because of EXcellence through Continuous Education and Learning. This is our EXCEL Program.”

The elements that distinguish the EXCEL Program are:
• GS&P has two full-time EXCEL Program staff dedicated to the direction, design, implementation, and measurement of all educational activities in the firm.
• The EXCEL Program develops and delivers training to 450 employees in its corporate office and more than 200 employees in its other offices, offering employees equal opportunity to continuing education regardless of location.
• GS&P uses Web technology to deliver training firmwide and get training to employees as soon as they are hired.
• With the exception of client-communication training, all in-house classes are taught by GS&P employees; more than 80 employees taught classes in 2002, including professional trainers, nurse practitioners, and firm partners.
• The NSTEP client-communication training allows architects to shadow employees of a GS&P-designed hospital to learn first-hand how the design works.

Professional Organization Category
Energy Center of Wisconsin

“Partnership with architects is an extremely effective way to market energy-efficient technologies and practices to the real world,” noted the Energy Center of Wisconsin (ECW) in their Award for Excellence submission. Energy efficiency in the built environment means economic development in the state, said this nonprofit education organization in justifying becoming an AIA/CES Registered Provider.

ECW provides energy-efficiency education, information, and technology demonstration to audiences nationwide. They show how their work has contributed to the success of Wisconsin’s business and the security of its citizens. ECW considers architects their critical allies in promoting energy-efficient building design and their key target audience for ECW education and training activities. Since its inception, ECW has trained more than a third of the 1,500 architects in Wisconsin.

ECW works directly with the AIA Wisconsin and other state and local chapters to develop educational opportunities. They research and demonstrate curriculum-development activities and actively train their trainers. The ECW process starts with needs assessment and moves through curriculum development, identification of learner objectives, program implementation, and evaluation that measures changed understanding and satisfaction.

Among the areas where ECW provides continuing education are design review, commissioning, daylighting, lighting design, LEED certification, high-performance buildings, codes, environmental sustainability, and building envelope.

Stakeholder—Commercial Category
Ron Blank & Associates

Continuing education is the business of Ron Blank & Associates, Inc. (RBA), says the principal of his 17-year-old design firm that manages multimillion-dollar commercial, industrial, highway, and heavy-construction projects. RBA employs architects, engineers, and specifiers to travel across the country to teach other design professionals about building products. The manufacturers they represent have spent years innovating and testing their products in the laboratory and field. Yet most of that information doesn’t reach the manufacturing community. In 1985, Ron Blank made it his goal to market manufacturers’ products by providing this technical information to designers.

“We believe that education is the key to developing a relationship between architects and our manufacturer clients,” Blank says. RBA selects manufacturers that have high-quality technology and have shifted from product sales promotions to product technology education.

“We provide architectural consulting services by making 1,400 visits annually to architecture firms throughout the U.S. to provide product technology. Our product-manufacturer clients sponsor our CES activities. This allows us to provide nonbiased product technology education to many architects for free,” Blank says. RBA educational venues include face-to-face presentations, box-lunch seminars, plant tours, Web-based courses, and roundtable programs. The firm also trains manufacturer representatives to deliver educational presentations.

Copyright 2003 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.