Green International’s Continuing Education Approach

by Ko Ishikura, PE, President, Green International Affiliates, Inc.

 

As President of Green International, I encourage continuing education at our firm on a number of levels. First off, the firm highly encourages our staff to be active members in all three sponsoring associations of The Engineering Center (TEC), namely BSCES, ACEC/MA and MALSCE. We cover annual membership costs and meeting attendance time and costs for our employees who are active in these associations and are willing to serve on committees. I strongly believe serving on professional association boards and committees as a volunteer is a great way to “give back” to the engineering profession which we all benefit from; and are therefore indebted. We also find that this is beneficial to both our employees and the firm itself, as active participation in the sponsor associations provides professional growth and leadership training opportunities for our staff and helps keep our firm up to date with the latest technology and trends in our profession.

 

Having served on the TEC Continuing Education Task Force that made a recommendation to the Board of Registration of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors for mandatory continuing education, I am also a strong advocate for continuing professional development. We pay for our employees to attend engineering conferences, seminars and workshops that help them strengthen their technical and leadership skills, which in turn, makes them more valuable to our firm and to the clients we serve. We also have a tuition reimbursement policy where we assist employees that are seeking advanced degrees and/or certifications in approved courses that will benefit them and our company, including review courses for Engineer or Surveyor-in-Training, Professional Engineer, or Professional Land Surveyor. Obviously, we encourage professional and career development for our staff and we pay for professional registaration fees, as well as all examination fees and time for taking those examinations.

 

We regularly send our staff to various leadership training courses offered by TEC sponsors. In addition, over the past few years, we have instituted a number of in-house training programs for both project managers and our entire staff in areas such as Safety, Quality Control/Quality Assurance, Budget Control, Controlling Risk, and Leadership, as well as numerous technical training programs (such as ASCE webinars). Many times these in-house seminars are brown bag formats held during lunch time. Our in-house training programs are run by both principals and project managers/engineers, depending on the subject. I highly encourage our staff to take the initiative and share their knowledge with their peers using the technology in our state of the art conference room.