Announcing FORA’s Evolve Label
As passionately curious design professionals, we love architecture because there’s never an end to what you can learn. At FORA, we are deeply committed to our team’s growth and development, but after hearing a number of requests for more training opportunities, we knew it was time to ramp up our efforts. Responding to that call to action, we are thrilled to share that our Associate Yoshi Jimenez stepped up to take the helm as FORA’s Mentorship and Education lead to help us further invest in formalizing our learning and education processes.
“ I’ve always enjoyed helping train younger/newer professionals and this project will allow me to really dive deeper into helping our team figure out what our areas for improvement are and help craft a program that can provide the training needed to continue making us grow our skills.”
FORA offers a wide range of policies and benefits that invest in our team’s personal and career development:
Bi-weekly one-on-ones to discuss goals, progress, health, and insights, allowing leadership to make timely staffing adjustments to provide target learning opportunities where needed
Quarterly feedback sessions with leadership to give and receive performance feedback
$500 per year education stipend and above-and-beyond grants for larger investments such as conference attendance
AXP and ARE resources including an AmberBook subscription and flexible schedules to accommodate testing
Licensure bonus to celebrate a major career milestone
8 hours per week dedicated to a research/knowledge specialty of their choosing
No fixed “job titles”, allowing people to perform different roles on different projects creating well-rounded exposure and opportunities for growth
Weekly team meetings dedicated to sharing lessons learned, hot tips, best practices, and hosting guest speaker lectures and panels
Weekly design collaborations to give everyone an opportunity to explore and learn from design challenges
While we’re proud to offer these great benefits, we also acknowledge that as a small firm, we’re limited in the amount and type of formal training and education programs we’re able to offer compared to resources you may find at much larger companies. That said, we knew we could do more, and a few months ago Yoshi came up with a plan to take our educational support to the next level…
Before we share what that is, let’s take a look at Yoshi describing her Specialty:
FORA’s New Assessment & Education Program
Yoshi describes her goals, “As a Mentorship and Education Lead at FORA, my focus is to help establish an education and training program that will provide continual education and skills development of all our employees. Besides establishing a more formal program, another key aspect of my specialty is to help maintain and strengthen our mentorship culture, in which everyone intentionally finds opportunities to share knowledge and insight into any aspect of our profession that they've gained throughout their experience. All of this working in conjunction with our DEI goals.”
Yoshi’s first step in crafting this new program was to put together a self-assessment questionnaire that our team will take annually. The survey helps people evaluate both their technical expertise and soft skills, and working from industry standard references such as NCARB’s AXP Guidelines ensured we were providing a comprehensive look at architectural skills.
The results from the surveys were turned into personal assessment labels, which we named the "FORA Evolve Label" inspired by the Just Label (more on that soon!), that provides a graphic look at experience level scores for each of the different categories evaluated. The Evolve label is then used as a tool to help determine which areas people are interested in "evolving" in as they think about your long term career goals.
A secondary goal for the assessment is to help set FORA’s current skills baseline and determine if, as a company, we have any skills gaps that we should focus on. Understanding this helps us take a more targeted approach to creating firm-wide education sessions and training for the following year that will provide the most impact.
Lastly, we'll be able to determine each other's strong and weak areas (we all have both!) and use this information to create mentor/mentee matches for more one on one training when possible, helping everyone grow mentoring skills and continue to provide people with the support they need in areas that might not be covered by firm-wide education efforts or direct guidance from leadership.
The Evolve Label
The results are in and in honor of Mentoring Month, we’re excited to share FORA’s first ever Team Evolve Label!
Based on these results, we’re focusing on (and have already begun!) providing firm-wide training on:
Project Planning
Cost Estimates
Specifications
Building Systems and Materials
Construction Administration Management
“This project will exemplify our collaborative approach when it comes to team development and reflect our team’s insatiable curiosity as we look for ways to continuously improve our skills.”
Thank you to Yoshi for your initiative and leadership in creating the FORA Evolve Label and investing in the further growth and development of our amazing team. We’re excited for the educational sessions to come and to see how we improve on our next annual assessment.
If you’re interested in crafting something similar for your company, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We’re always happy to share tips and resources with like-minded firms who understand that the strengths of the individual determines the strength of the company as a whole.
