Professional Development for Cx Practitioners

Michael Kaplan, PE, Kaplan Engineering
David Sellers, PE, Facility Dynamics Engineering

Learn how to empower team members and gain valuable insight through mentoring in this session with Michael Kaplan and David Sellers. Kaplan will present the concept that commissioning team members want to feel good about the quality of their work, and that team communication should be based on that assumption. He will address related communication issues such as praise and blame, aggressiveness, etc., and will investigate methods of dealing with these.

David Sellers will focus on the benefits of mentoring for both the mentee and mentor. Mentoring is a powerful tool for developing the field savvy needed by entry level providers to allow them to apply the commissioning process to a project. While understanding the commissioning process requires one set of skills, learning to interact with the field issues that emerge as one applies the process to a project requires a gut level understanding that is best achieved through experience. Developing field savvy in new recruits to the commissioning industry may be one of the biggest challenges we face. Using case studies, Sellers will demonstrate how mentoring can be an important method for conveying this type of knowledge.