The market decided a long time ago that your typical geotechnical engineering company would consist of a principal engineer and some senior level support staff. GeoWerks Engineering is no different in that respect.
Where we see this model breakdown is when an engineering firm has more projects on any given day than they do senior level staff to service those projects. This is why the geotechnical engineering technician is so important. This position was designed to fill the void between work and a lack of staff. This means that in many instances geotechnical engineering technician is the representative that clients will work with on a given project. They are the key account holder and they report the results of their testing directly back to the geotechnical engineer.
Enter the Need for Certifications
The engineering technicians at GeoWerks Engineering are trained by the principal engineer of the company. Further, the engineering technical is vetted by the principal engineer of the company and is required to participate in continuing education. The continuing education for the engineering technician typically comes in the form of renewable certifications(1 year, 3 year, and 5 year renewals typically speaking). We take this a bit further at GeoWerks Engineering and encourage our staff, upon hiring, to do both a mentoring program with the principal engineer as well as annual certifications throughout the industry.
“We like our staff to take it upon themselves and continue to improve their knowledge around known industry standards.“
Our Focus On the Big Three
Beyond mentoring, which is an important part of the training for our engineering technicians, we focus on the big three certifications for employees at GeoWerks Engineering.
- National Institute for Certification in Engineering Technologies (NICET)
- American Concrete Institute (ACI)
- International Code Council (ICC)
While all three are important, we find that the ICC is the most popular because local municipalities accept those certifications in lieu of a local municipal inspector coming to your project. For example, in Forsyth County, if you are constructing a building the county no longer has structural inspectors. Instead, they ask you to pick from a list of approved ICC inspectors that are hired by engineering companies.
The Advantage of Cross Certification
Everybody understands the importance of certification in our industry. What GeoWerks Engineering does a bit differently comes in the cross certification of our technicians. We see value in having a technician that is certified in multiple aspects of the project. Why? Our clients get continuity with a single individual over multiple phases of their project. A great example would be offering up a technician that is only certified in soils at the beginning of a project. By the time this project gets to the concrete phase — without cross certifications — we would need to remove this individual because they are no longer competent based on our client’s needs. Instead, GeoWerks Engineering prefers to offer cross certified technicians so that when the phase of the project changes, that individual can remain on site, and our clients have the continuity they need.
“We see value in having a technician that is certified in multiple aspects of the project.”
This is a Staff Initiative
We like our staff to take it upon themselves and continue to improve their knowledge around known industry standards. Just like any other industry, standards change as the level of sophistication changes. As our staff continually improves on their understanding of the industry, and the standards that we are required to follow, we can ensure our clients that our focus is not on outdated or stagnant information. We want to be able to change with the industry and we expect our our technicians to continually improve their skill sets. Over time this has allowed us to hire quality employees and service our clients at an exceptionally high rate of satisfaction.
