American Council of Engineering Companies

I am thrilled to be here, first of all, and really enjoy the programming that...

ACEC puts on and these podcasts, right? Really an opportunity to tell stories and connect with others.

For me, I would say what excites me most about joining the Art for a Broderick team is the legacy of the firm.

You know, what I'm walking into and being invited to add to, I think is what certainly excites me.

And it was that statement that about eight years later, I was thinking, okay, what do we want to do as an organization? Elevate the industry, right? Like make it more attractive to kids coming out of school.

And that's what I love about the alignment between our mission and what ACEC does and why it's so important

for us to be here.

Yeah, and that's a good transition point because really what we've done is, especially through the Institute, the ACEC Research Institute and ACEC also, is just try to work on how do we elevate the industry? How do we encourage firms to develop the systems and the processes, the policies that encourage the next generation of engineers to join the workforce and also to give more people opportunities a voice at the table, right? And I think that that was really the impetus behind really the community building roadmap, which is something that's been going on for a couple of years now.

Now, for anybody out there who's not completely familiar with that, kind of give us a description of what that is and how that fits in with what you're doing with ACEC.

Yeah, so I want to describe the community roadmap in a little bit of a different way because anybody that's listening to this podcast can go look it up.

Certainly, it's a benchmarking platform, right? Now, it's changed names, or I guess maybe it's evolved over the years.

So

Mm-hmm.

Um, and so what we offer is, um, the, um, ACEC's Emerging Professionals program.

Mm-hmm.

Um, through this program we, um, offer n- first thing is our internships.

Conferences is another one.

We're, we're getting ready to go to, um, the ACEC conference in Phoenix at the end of October and present there with one of our civil engineering customers, FHU.

Um, in addition to that, the referral or the trusted, uh, introduction where somebody's willing to give you 15 minutes to have a call.

Right.