On Thursday, October 12 and Friday, October 13, several of our team members attended the National Council of Structural Engineers Association’s (NCSEA) annual conference in Washington, D.C. This event showcased new products and featured experts in the field from across the country.
“I learned so much at the conference,” said Valerie Hill of the Charlottesville office. “From structural engineering topics to business development and networking. A big focus for us as a company is constant improvement and innovation, and the conference inspired me to keep growing as an individual and as a team.”
Team members attended a variety of sessions at the conference. One of the highlights included a keynote address about the reinforcement of the Washington Monument and Washington National Cathedral due to damage from a 5.8-magnitued earthquake in Mineral, VA in 2011.
“It was great to see real-life examples from our region,” said Jack Cash of the Harrisonburg office. “This conference is held at a different location every year, but being in D.C., I appreciated some of the more locally focused content.”
Other sessions, such as “Ideas to Grow Your Firm’s Clientele and Advance Your Career,” gave team members insight into some of the business practices being implemented to improve processes.
“I learned a lot about business development,” said Valerie. “It’s an important part of our job but it’s easy to overlook it when we’re busy with projects. As a small business, every team member needs to be engaged and wear multiple hats at any given moment. These sessions showed me how it’s possible to continue doing that even better.”
Continuing to learn over the course of a career is vital as structural engineers, and conferences can often be the catalyst to making big strides.
“I definitely took home a lot of the messages from the conference,” Jack said. “I’m planning to stay in touch with many of the people we met and have been emailing back and forth with some of them this week. I’ve also been able to apply what we learned there on the projects I’ve worked on since then.”
You can check out more photos from the NCSEA Conference on Facebook and Instagram.
