How do you train or "grow" a spec writer?

Archive of Older Topics Archive - Specifications Discussions #3
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There’s a certain willingness to self-educate that’s essential to specifying, so it may be that so many specifiers are self-taught because we can self-teach. I’m self-selected, partially self-taught, and mentored with kindness. Unfortunately, I’m not mentored with proximity: my mentor is 5000 miles away across the WAN. Still, my community, mostly my virtual community, is the key to why I keep specifying and keep learning.

I wish I knew the answer to Susan’s question about avoiding the “error” in “trial-and-error”. Probably the nugget I would volunteer is “Don’t issue a spec you don’t understand.” If you are using a master you didn’t write and you don’t understand what it says, either go find out or go ask someone. If I wasn’t humble before I became a specifier, I was humbled the day one of my colleagues pointed out that I’d been routinely retaining a product in our master that’s nearly never used, simply because I thought it was something else and hadn’t bothered to find out what it actually was. This principle goes deep: don’t reference an ASTM you’ve never seen, don’t guess what a value ought to be, don’t write a spec for a product you’ve never heard of until you’ve researched it.

Of course there’s a flip side: you can research something to the last detail and blow the budget. I suppose the antitdote to this is to pace yourself: spend the most time on the least-familiar subjects and the highest-risk subjects. This is the part of time management that I need to remind myself… Thanks for asking, Susan!

22

I agree with Vivian that the ability (and interest) in self-education is absolutely critical. I had to remind a younger colleague that part of his job description was the ability to develop his own resources and answer his own questions – I was not there to simply be an encyclopedia. I’m still suprised at the number of people I meet in this business who simply aren’t curious about anything. I think the best spec writers I know are always asking weird questions and they definitely are masters of irrelevant information.

I used to pick two things on every project that I was going to learn “all about” when I was first starting. its impossible to know everything about everything all the time, but one job at a time, you can learn a lot about a couple of things. as you get older, the critical skill is figuring out if what you know is relevant or not.. or whether you have to relearn it. That’s a whole different critical thinking skill, and I bet we all know specifiers who are writing specs as though it was still 1982.

I honestly think that the “error” part is important in education and the ability to get yelled at regularly by the construction administration people and not take it personally. (of course no one yells anymore except in New York, but that’s a change in the industry). I remember one time a contractor calling me and saying “why do you have this blankety blank in the specs because no one uses it and it doesn’t work and its been in there for the past 5 years?” and I said “if you had told me this 4-1/2 years ago, I would have taken it out”. the communication HAS to go both ways, and developing those resources is essential to doing your job properly. You need to be approachable and curious, and not everyone has those traits.

23

Anne I disagree. I believe that it is the obligation of the senior people to help educated the junior staff. Throughout my career I am very grateful for those people that have helped educate me along the way. In return (“pay it forward”), I help educate those around me. Education of the staff is one of the reasons why my firm has an in-house specifier rather than an out-side consultant.

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David, I think you missed her point. you must do both. self learning (sometimes the hard way) AND advice and mentoring.

25

Marcs right. No amount of mentoring could possibly overcome the deficit of knowledge that results from a specifiers failure to actively self-educate. That isnt to say that senior staff does not bear a responsibility to thoroughly educate junior staff.

Likewise, project architects should strive to share the lessons they learn in the field with their project teams back at the office. As easy as it is to e-mail large groups of people in the office, there is no excuse for holding back information when mistakes are discovered in the field. Both the specifiers and drafters depend on project architects to inform them when improvements need to be made.

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I second Vivian and Anne.

Our generation of specifiers are continually self-educating ourselves through reading, forums such as this, specifiers share groups, seminars, conventions, etc. We are deffinitely masters of information but not irrelevant information. I have a huge personal library of soup to nuts. I may not use it’s contents very often but what goes around comes around. When that happens, I usually have an answer somewhere in my library.

It never ceases to amaze me how little the majority of my former and current colleagues know of fundamental information such as undercuts, steel frames, CMU, brick veneer, AESS, precast concrete, high-performance coatings, etc. Most of the young people (under 40) in my current office are LEED savy, but, with few exceptions, not technically savy.

When I receive a question on a topic that I take for granted that everyone should know, it gives me pause for thought that perhaps more do not know the answer. In my current office I use an internal web-based forum to publish such information. However, the number of hits in the forum posting is dismal as best. You can take the horse to water but you cannot… It is disappointing and discouraging but I press on.

In 1973 I started writing one spec section at a time under the direction of a seasoned specifier. I lived and worked in Canada at the time. I took the Specifications Writer’s Assocation of Canada (SWAC) correspondence course then took on the larger portion of the specificaitons. This is long before PC’s and Macs. My favored technique was cut and paste, redlines, and copious hand written paragraphs, concluded by hand off to a typist. Tools of the trade included scissors, stapler, magic mending tape, triangular scale, red pen, white out, and a ruled pad (preferably a quad pad).

In the past I have made some glaring dumb ass mistakes but also won a Merit Award from CSI for a spec written for a complex Canadian project.

Like Anne, I prefer my younger colleagues to perform their own research first, and when all else fails, come for assistance and advice.

27

I would like to add that when I said that to my younger colleague, I was at a remote office in all-day meetings, had already answered 8 emails and phone calls (by noon of that day) from that colleague and most of them were questions that he could have EASILY found the answers to for himself. this is also someone who “bookmarks” EVERY email with an ! and electronically requests a receipt when you open the email. I might also add that unless I am on vacation, I respond to every email and phone call within a four hour window. there is not knowing how to find the answer, and then there is just laziness.

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I have a strong hunch [having taught and just observing] that it will be increasingly hard for us to find young people who even know how to self-educate. More and more they will be people who “find” all they need in the computer. No need to research in the library for a paper-- you can find or buy one on the computer and crib it for your work.[and even cribbing may be too much work!]

And yes, I think there is also a level of laziness, called “just ask” where a minimal effort gets them what they need. And it maybe that we “feed” all that simply by the project schedules we have to deal with-- i.e., its’ easier to merely give the information than to tell them to go look it up.

29

Ralph, I do that now! These days there’s not much I can’t answer from the computer, but you still need to know where to look. And, specifiers have been cribbing for years. How often do you actually type a new section completely from scratch?

I think sometimes it’s easy to forget how hard it is early in one’s career to know what the heck is going on, and how to learn more. Here in my office, most of the young folks are eager to learn and genuinely appreciate it. But also, there’s always pressure to get work done quickly which inhibits learning.

30

John, I think you are correct, but then two things have stuck with me since college [also known as my “early” or “younger” days]–

Try to know what you don’t know!
and
Knowing where to try to find what you don’t know.

To me, both of those challenges still remain, but not sure about the first-- most youngsters seem to think they know pretty much all since it is somewhere on the computer

31

Hey, its gotta be true: I read it on the INTERNET!

I disagree, Ralph. Sure, Ive run into many who are answer-seekers, not problem-solvers, and probably there were just as many who succumbed to laziness years ago. We wont find the seed corn for future specifiers in the tell me the answer crowd; it will be found among the problem solvers. And I think the up and coming generations contain more problem solvers than we sometimes realize.

There are many younger architects who are passionate about self-education and who recognize that they themselves are the primary drivers of their own careers. Ive been privileged to mentor several who impressed me with an inner need to think through all aspects of a problem to find a solution, who have become excellent technically competent architects, and who could become wonderful specifiers, if that is what they want to do.

I wonder if we need to do a better job of letting the younger generation in on the dark secret of specification writers: what we do is fun! Specifications is a specialty that can be very rewarding, creative, and challenging. I know I am doing some choir preaching here to passionate specifiers, but the profession has seldom given specifiers their due.

Certainly, when I was a precocious young architect who knew everything, becoming a specifier was the last thing I ever thought Id be doing. Im very glad to be here now, but perhaps if I had some better role models who were more positive about specifications 30 years ago, I might have gotten into it earlier.

[For all you old folks, today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis, if he is in fact dead. I know its true, I read it on the INTERNET.]

32

I didn’t know Elvis wrote specifications!

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and, I might add, that just yesterday one of the young people in this office came to me and asked how they could go into specifications and focus on that as a career. we’re going to have lunch next week. (have to go: we’re putting out a "bamboo document package " this morning. this would make more sense if it were actually written on bamboo, than being about bamboo.)

34

Just to put things in perspective…

"“Youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, no respect for older people, and talk nonsense when they should be working. Young people do not stand up any longer when adults enter the room. They contradict their parents, talk too much in company, guzzle their food, lay their legs on the table and tyrannize their elders.”

  • Socrates 399 BC
35

George wrote:
“I wonder if we need to do a better job of letting the younger generation in on the dark secret of specification writers: what we do is fun! Specifications is a specialty that can be very rewarding, creative, and challenging.”

Hear, hear! Thank you, George: I do think that’s the answer!

Specifying is problem-solving, idea-chasing, design-focused, satsifying work. It doesn’t belong in a back room, or a black box, because it’s collaborative. It’s the fast track to becoming the person everyone calls with the interesting problems to solve, because it involves constant learning and constant problem-solving. If we talk about it this way, everywhere, the right people will be attracted to it, people who will excel at it.

(In the middle of writing this, I got a call from one of the PAs in the field, who prefaced his question with “You’re the one we call when we have a weird problem to solve.” Made me grin.)

36

To get back to the original question of, “How do you train or grow a spec writer?”…

As one who has more recently entered the spec writing field, I would suggest that to “successfully” accomplish this task, it requires distinct but separate demands upon both the mentor and mentee. Since much has been addressed as to the mentees’ responsibility and need for self-motivation, desire to learn, attention to detail, etc., I suggest on a very fundamental level, that if senior spec writers want to increase their members, a mentor should be aware of the following:

  1. Have a sincere desire to help the junior spec writer develop successfully. The goal is to develop a good if not great spec writer. In short, if one doesn’t care, how committed are they to truly help?

  2. Be careful not to project one’s own strength and weaknesses on to another. This may seem obvious, but a mentor needs to understand the mentee has their own unique set of skills, and that it it is best to work with the mentee’s strengths, while providing their own expertise in their areas of weakness. Having unspoken expectations of the other person can lead to a perceived failure on the mentee’s part, when in reality, they may have a different approach to working/learning than was initially assumed.

  3. To expect that a mentee must “figure it out” is not as effective as providing guidelines and resources. The mentee still has to do the work, but if a senior spec writer has processes and steps, why make someone flail in the wind? The goal again, is to develop a good spec writer, not to make the path more difficult for a novice. This doesn’t discount the fact that the mentee needs to work hard, but the goal is to bring the mentee up from where they are currently, to another level. Is it necessary to require a novice to reinvent the wheel? (i.e. is the goal to encourage or discourage new members?) Or would it be more effective to give them a basic framework to build upon and then let them explore ways to improve and develop as they acquire more understanding and their own expertise?

  4. You need a certain amount of proactive involvement. Active engagement will help the process more than a simply passive approach. This does not mean micromangaging or providing continual oversight, but by again, providing expertise. By being reactive only to the issues and subjects raised by the mentee is not really training. Initiation by both parties is necessary, as the mentee will not know all there is to discuss or address in the first place.

5 . If you are not seeing the desired results, than ask yourself if you are communicating effectively to achieve those results. Or perhaps explain to the mentee what your expectations are so they have an idea of how they should be developing. Or another approach could be to help in identifying what is preventing the mentee from achieving a certain result. Whatever the case may be, communication at BOTH ends is key.

I do not believe anyone would willingly enter this field and not know the amount of work and learning that is needed. At the most basic level, there must be a desire to self-educate, grow in knowledge and expertise. It is the responsibility of the more experienced to make it all the more accessible and attractive.

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Konrad,

That was a excellent post! Thanks.

You really emphasize that in order for proper knowledge to be exchanged that the teacher has to be willing to teach and the student willing to learn. Effective communication is the key!

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I sincerely appreciate all this interest in this topic. This was not a rhetorical or idle question on my part. We currently have a specifier position open and would pay a competitive salary, but we have had so little interest that we decided to hire some assistants for me. Assuming that entry level people could not possibly have any construction qualifications, we looked for people who were curious, eager to learn, and intelligent – several of your recommended qualities.

Now I must decide WHAT to teach them. This is not exactly the same as how to grow a specifier, but the information-knowledge requirements are very similar. The first thing I am teaching them is about reference standards – what they are, how to read them, why and how we use them, and how to read the spec to see whether it uses them correctly. There are two reasons for proceeding this way – we need to keep our references to standards up-to-date, so they accomplish a vital job while learning, and after reading a lot of your comments, I realized that it might be impossible to teach someone how to write specs before they learned how to READ them. It’s the same principle as expressed in a book I heard about on NPR last week – it was by a fiction writer about “how to read like a writer.” Reading good books to study how they were written would help the reader learn how to write better.

So, maybe the first part of a course on specifying or spec writing is SPEC READING. There are way more spec readers in our industry than there are spec writers. If we taught how to read specs, sort of like the “Contractor’s Guide to Change Orders,” ambitious spec writers would learn from it too, just as the change order book has benefited A/E’s who paid attention.

So, any ideas on how to teach SPEC READING?

39

The best way to teach “spec reading” is “spec using”. I strongly believe that architects, engineers, specifiers, and other professionals involved in the construction process should go out a pound a few nails for a while and actually use the documents that they (or more likely someone else) wrote. One of the problems I see is that our specs are becoming more and more “academic” instead of a tool that a contractor can use to construct the building.

I have done some construction administration and found it to be very valuable to the way that I write specifications.

40

Our local BEC chapter did an awesome event called the “Window Flashing Rodeo”, where we grouped into teams, studied the various code requirements and installation instructions, made a shop drawing detail, then on the weekend flashed and installed a window, and watched it either pass or fail the ASTM E 1105 spray test. Designs that passed the test generally had a good head flashing and also sill pan to allow for the possibility that the window itself might actually leak due to the positive & negative pressure cycles, usually at the meeting bar.

These kinds of hands-on educational opportunities, as well as construction site visits, some manufacturer based training programs and factory tours are good to seek out.