Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:00

Hello, listeners, this is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you recall every Nate I've ever met when they introduce themselves and the person Miss hears they say, Dave, I recently met randomly, somebody who reached out on LinkedIn who was named Nate. I asked him straight up, and he responds back. He's like, yes, lol, all the time I have to, like, pronounce the hard T. I'm telling you, it's a conspiracy theory. It's not even a theory. It's a conspiracy.

Albert Brier: 0:37

It's, it's just, it's not a conspiracy that requires planning, okay, speaking for the rest of us who are not named Nate or Dave, there is no plan here.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:45

And for all you Nate's listening, I have started a LinkedIn page branded Nate, not Dave, on LinkedIn. So please join my LinkedIn community, Nate.

Albert Brier: 0:57

Oh, my God. You know, on behalf of the rest of us out there with sensible names that are easy to pronounce. You know what? I can't do that because no one, I mean, people can pronounce my name, but my last name, nobody can spell it. No one can spell Briar. I would love to throw this to the listeners. Be like, spell my last name Briar. Now. Don't cheat. Don't go to the Show page. Don't look at your podcast app. Just spell it in your head. What do you get? I'm gonna give you a second. B R, Y, E R, yeah, exactly. That's what. B R, I A R,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:25

at least you're not getting Dave, that's what I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. And it's been proven as recently as last week, and I'm going to continue so again to all those Nate's out there, please join my LinkedIn group. Nate dot Dave. On LinkedIn,

Albert Brier: 1:38

I'll see you. Nate, Nate. Dave, not Nate. Dot Dave, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:42

Nate, Nate, Dave, okay? Because you probably, you probably heard Dave, not Dave, right? Is that? Yeah, no,

Albert Brier: 1:50

I heard, I heard Nate, but I wasn't sure about hearing Nate dot Dave, as I think Dave was a top level domain.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:54

I think Nate's just generally have a gap in the speaking skill department, which is a kind of like prelude to our topic today. So what are we talking about? Nate slash, Dave, we're going to talk about the skills gap, a crisis, in fact. So like, imagine, you know, you're trying to, you know, get a billion dollar project off the ground, and you're in infrastructure. You lack a whole swath of skilled professionals from all over the project in all kinds of different disciplines, and they're not available. And so we're going to talk about what's going on.

Albert Brier: 2:33

Yeah, you know, and you're right. I would love to know the answer to this question, because the what you're posing isn't a hypothetical for me, like I actually do staff project teams onto billion dollar projects or programs of work. And I don't always have the ability to, just like, pick from the list of, you know, the long, long list of highly qualified people. That list doesn't exist for me, right? And I've always been curious about why that is. But can I tell you a quick story that, yeah, okay, so I moved to Canada in 2014 to support a project, which we actually talked about

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:06

last time, another project, that's right, another podcast, same podcast, different episodes.

Albert Brier: 3:11

That's okay, right? That's okay. Dave, so the project was the Imperial campus project, and Imperial hired me originally, to come up and do, like, to write a memo. Basically, they hired me to show up and say, here's what you guys need from a project controls, but more specifically a schedule management perspective. So I put together like, a little org chart, a WBS for, you know, for the work, and said, like, here's, here's what you need. Like, here's how many people, here's how you should carve the work up. Here's some job descriptions, like, here's you're gonna hire them. They're like, okay, great. We hire that person. We want you to hire the senior scheduler. Okay, says I this was in 2013 by the way. So 2013 by the way, 12 years ago, for those of you listening in the dim and misty future from your space yacht or whatever. But anyway, so 12 years ago, I threw out the net into the entirety of Western Canada, you know, BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, mainly, we found, I think, three qualified candidates in the entirety of Western Canada. One fit the bill. We hired him a few months in he decided that it wasn't really working out for him, and he was going to go on sabbatical, and he vanished. He quit and he vanished. Okay, so during that time, I kept receiving feedback that, like, hey, this guy's really technically skilled, like he knows what he's doing, like he brings a lot to the table, but he doesn't really jive with our culture, like he's not fitting in, like he doesn't seem happy, like he's not he's not building the relationships that you need to be a good planner, right? Yep, and that was worrisome to me. So, like, my plan was to go up and, like, coach this guy and, like, help him get integrated, exactly right, and write about what I was planning to do that sabbatical, and he disappears. Yeah, right. So, yeah, oof is right. So you know. I told the story last time as if, like, oh, you know, they needed me for this project, so they brought me up here on a commuter contract, and then I moved here, and I've lived here for the past, you know, 10 years more, right? 11 years, and now you know why? Okay, it wasn't because that was Plan A. This is very much Plan B, like Plan A was for us to hire somebody in Western Canada, and we couldn't do it. So, yeah, it's true.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 5:21

There is a shortage, like a massive shortage. Like, we've had discussions with clients, you know, in BC, in Ontario, in Alberta, like they can't find the people that they need to execute, to plan and then execute the projects, yeah, yeah, that they're that they have on their roadmap.

Albert Brier: 5:41

And we we aggregated some research for this episode that tells us that about 94% of construction contractors can't fill their open positions and project controls. 94% Yeah, so Wow. And layer that similar research, 41% of the workforce is going to retire by 2031 Now that may sound like the past to you, space, space yacht person, but it's six years in the future for us. Yeah. So six years isn't that long. I'll still be working by them.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 6:07

We also had some research on just how many major projects like an individual might do in their entire career. So six years, I mean, that's that might be just one project. It could

Albert Brier: 6:19

just be, yeah, exactly. So a lot of people who are writing out their last project right now, right? And those people won't have replacements necessarily in six years lined up. So a lot of people balk when asked to train their replacement, you know, like, Oh, this is here's gonna be the next Albert. I'm like, Well, what's wrong with the current Albert? You know, I'm still here. Man. Like, what

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 6:38

about Albert 1.0 so let me just, let's set the stage for a little bit like you, you've talked about a bunch of different problems. Can you just sum up and just level set with us? What is the issue that

Albert Brier: 6:49

so the issue is, I think there's, there's two right? One is that the nature of my work, like my profession, Project controls, is changing rapidly, right? And it's changing. We're not like, there isn't like, a 10 year plan. We don't know what it's changing into. It's changing, you know, while we watch. So, you know, folks like myself, I'm rapidly becoming an old timer here. I'm having to adapt as things go so I'm, I'm a lagging indicator on how things are changing, not a leading one. So when I hire somebody that's going to need 235, years of training and seasoning to get up to, you know, my level or better. I mean, I hope it would take longer than two

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 7:28

years, quite self aware of you, to say,

Albert Brier: 7:31

hey, somebody's going to take at least 15 minutes to know what I know, you know. But no, seriously, like anybody who's going to take years to develop the skill set to be, like, independently, you know, useful on a project. Yeah, right. Like, I don't know what skills they're going to need by the time they reach that objective. Nobody does, you know. So that's, that's one of the problems, right? It's like, we know there's a skills gap. We don't even know which skills there is a gap for. So that's, that's thing. One Thing Two is the skills that we can identify are atrophying so things like, you know, again we talked about this last time, there's a lot of knowledge and experience that comes from firsthand

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 8:13

on site. Remember the other episode where we talked about on site

Albert Brier: 8:18

exactly, with so much work being offshored that that's going to further reduce how much time people are spending on job sites. But we're not waiting for that. Like, we've reduced that already. Like, even before covid, there was a trend towards people managing schedule via conference call, you know, where, like, rather than spend 1000s of dollars kidding them out with, you know, fire retardant gear and safety stuff, and, like, you know, reflecting stripes and teaching them how to be safe on site, and you know, how to what happens when you see a bear, which, by the way, you need extensive training to know what to do when you see a bear if you're going to be working in the arboreal forest, because there'd be bears, you know, yes. So like, guess where you're not going to find a bear in your living room, unless you are a bear. I mean, you maybe, yeah, yeah, you know, I guess I shouldn't assume.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 9:04

I mean, that makes it a general assumption about the nature of my living room, but it does, yeah, maybe, maybe I want bears in my

Albert Brier: 9:10

Yeah, I'm not referring to ceramic or I digress here. Yeah, you sure did. Yeah. Anyway, the point is that, like, all that costs money, right? It costs time, yeah. So there's a perception that you can get, you know, most, if not all of the job done without ever sending someone through all that, right? Like when I was working in Nigeria, I had to take extensive training about malaria prevention and personal safety, and, you know, those kinds of things, because there may not be any more, but there certainly was, at the time, a fairly high kidnapping risk for expats like at the airport, you really have to know how like who to talk to, who is safe, who isn't safe, how to get through that process without getting kidnapped is like a skill you need to learn. So you don't need to learn it if you're never going to Nigeria. You know,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 9:55

does all of this translate into you? Like, premium pricing for client like it maybe, let's take a step back. Let's talk about like, our experience. So you mentioned earlier staffing for projects like, what are you seeing right now? Like with our work with our clients?

Albert Brier: 10:14

Yeah, well, I mean to answer both of your questions at once, because it's so hard for me to find junior people who are already skilled. It effectively does translate to a premium on especially scheduling talent. Right? Most of the people that we staff onto our client sites are either schedulers or risk professionals, and those are the two project control disciplines that are kind of like they're the bottom of the filter, like you have to have done all the other stuff in order to be good at those things, especially risk. So there's some degree of experience. What other stuff? Well, sorry, cost and estimating. Okay, you know that kind of thing, like field measurements, you know, things that are that are more quantitative in nature. And it's weird for me to describe schedule as qualitative, but it kind of is like it's more art than science, like there's a black magic element to it. It's like, when you talk to a mechanical engineer, they can tell you, here's how a motor works. When you talk to an electrical engineer, they can say, we think this is how electricity works. There's like a black magic element to scheduling and risk that isn't present in some of the other stuff. In order for me to field an experienced planner scheduler, I have to make one. I have to hire somebody straight out of school.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:21

That's the black magic, right? Like, you're just, yeah, exactly.

Albert Brier: 11:23

Like, I have to, I have a room full of apprentices dressed in black robes, yeah, right. So all kidding aside, like I do have to train people if I want them to do things. You know, the quote, unquote, correct way. I'm saying the correct way, because what I really mean is the Albert way. But, you know, lots of experience has taught me that the Albert way is, generally speaking, pretty good, right? Like, it resonates with clients. It gets the job done. So if I want people to follow that, you know, methodology and like, know the things that I know, I have to be the one to teach them that.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:52

What about the people that we're hiring? Like, what are they coming to the table with? Because we've got some all stars that work here, that you've trained. But what do you like? What did they come to the table with

Albert Brier: 12:03

so weirdly, our two best degrees, like our previous experience, if you will, like the that have turned into, like our best project, controls. People are finance and it interesting. Yeah, that's not

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 12:16

what I would like. Maybe because they speak the language like they understand the mechanisms they understand, like frameworks, perhaps, like, what would

Albert Brier: 12:26

you say? I think maybe it's because they just attract intelligent people, you know, like curious people who are task oriented and eager to learn, you know, right? So, and I don't know whether that trend would hold true for everybody doing this same work in the industry. But what I will tell you is we have made very, very few experienced hires into scheduling and risk very, very few. The one I can think of, honestly, is somebody that I've known for 11 years. So like, we hired him because I knew him, and I knew he was good, and part of the reason why I knew he was good is because we'd worked together. Can we give him a shout out of us working? Yeah, man, it's Roger. Yeah, Roger. Hey, Roger. Shout out to Roger. But yeah, Roger and I worked together for a long, long time, and part of the reason why he's a really good scheduler is because he and I worked on it together and I trained him. You know, the point, though, is that there's, there's a level of training required that does put a pretty significant time limit on when I can field a scheduler onto a project

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:25

when we can't find good people, skilled people to fill these like, what areas of a capital project are suffering the most?

Albert Brier: 13:35

Well, I would I would say it's probably risk, right? Why that? I would say it's probably risk because that bottom of the filter effect I was talking about before, you can train somebody to manage a schedule. You know, quote, unquote, manage a schedule relatively quickly, if the only thing you expect them to do is, like, do data entry into p6 which a lot of schedulers now believe that that's what their job is, right? Like they receive, they receive an update, they process it just enough to type it into p6 and then they forget it ever happened. Like, they're not project professionals, they're data analysts and data entry clerks. Like, that's not what the what the planning profession is meant to be, right? Why am I talking about schedulers? When you ask me about risk professionals? Because a good risk professional needs to be a good planner, right? Doing risk management means having your arms around cost and quality and the scope, right? So you have to be pretty experienced at a lot of different kinds of work in order to do risk. And you know, this is reflected in the data, right? Like, there, there is a, there's a 20 to 40% salary premium over average project controls. Professional, okay, for a risk professional. So, like, if your average schedule is making 100 grand, your average risk professionals making 130

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 14:56

so like, the concrete guys versus the welders, right?

Albert Brier: 14:59

Yes, there are. Certain trades where there is a as a premium, because the skill gap is so is there, right? So, like, a risk is definitely that, right? And a lot of owners are writing Monte Carlo risk analysis. And if they're if they're going standards compliant, then they're writing integrated cost and schedule Monte Carlo risk analyzes into their requirements so that every project has to complete. You know, a Monte Carlo has been every six months or 12 months, or at gates, or whatever. That's a lot of risk analysis. So you can see, right, like ever decreasing number of those people, and there's an ever increasing demand for them,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 15:37

but, but generally speaking, like there is an analysis that needs to happen. And it's just not straightforward that anybody can step into the role and do what they, you know, do what we need them to do. But I'm glad you brought that up. I'm glad you brought that up, because we can, we can, kind of, like, switch gears to talk about sort of remote work. I want to talk about AI too. You know you were alluding to, you know how stuff is changing, and analysis is really important part of our work. What is, what's? What is that?

Albert Brier: 16:12

You asked me, What? What is the black magic? Well, I know it when I see it right. Like, some people just aren't good schedulers, and there's that's nothing against them, like, they just don't have the like, lateral thinking for it. Some people need to be focused on something like the some of the best cost managers I know are, like, absolutely killer estimators. They're great at cost management. They'll keep a project on track from a cost perspective. They'll make sure the changes don't fly out of control. They can read a contract and understand it like instinctively, but you put them in front of a schedule and they are lost in the woods. Could you because, no, no, I was just gonna say, there's just a little something that just makes, I don't know, it just, it's just a different skill.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:51

It's, it's qual, it's the quad qualitative like abilities, the soft skills to do analysis and sort of the thinking, whether it's like on your feed or, you know, whatever. But could you have somebody in India, like, we talked about offshoring before. Could you have somebody like, there's India, lot of companies have offshored to India, you know, other like, could you have somebody doing schedule analysis over there? So if

Albert Brier: 17:16

someone is doing that job from India or China or wherever, frankly, they might be amazing. Have the secret sauce do the black magic, but just be lacking the context that they need from a site visit or multiple site visits, or, you know, like the interpersonal relationships you develop by being on site like you can get more out of a construction manager who trusts you, you know, because you've, like, hung out together and you know how each other thinks, then you can out of someone who was instructed to like you by their boss, right? You know,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 17:47

should, uh, like, if I'm a 35 year old schedule, that's a youngin compared to, you know, my old age. I'm, yeah, quite and quite along in my years is, like, should they worry about their like, a lot of companies, though, trying to cover, like, reduce costs and whatever is the 35 year old schedule who's just starting to, like, hit their stride. Like, are they should they be worried?

Albert Brier: 18:09

That's another one of those really hard to answer. Like, where are we going to be in 10 years? Kind of questions, I mean, like, I hope the answer is no. But one of the ways that I've survived and thrived in this industry is by developing and cultivating a wide variety of skills, right, right? Like I am, I am not the best project scheduler I've ever met, nor am I the best estimator or risk manager or quality manager or construction manager, or I'm not the best at any one of those things, but I am the only person who has the depth of knowledge that I have in all of them, right, that I've ever met, right? So, you know, it makes me pretty broadly useful, right? And the fact that I'm a, I'm a decent technical writer, too, means that I can take all that stuff and commit it to text so I can do the work. I can teach people how to do the work. I can write procedures on how other people should do the work. I can analyze the work, right? I can do all of those things. You can sing too. I can sing dance, but I can sing. Will I prove that?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 19:08

No, I will not, but I, I'd like to prove it someday, but Well, one day, perhaps one day, let's talk about the like, the impact of AI, right? Like we don't know in 10 years, it's hard to answer the question. Like, I know it was a tough question when I was asking, like, we don't know, yeah, but what we are observing, and we've talked on quite a few episodes, is the impact that AI is having on this industry. So like, can you just get into that sort of describe, yeah, for sure, like, within this context.

Albert Brier: 19:39

So some stats from our research, like last year. The this is from our research, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So last year they said that over the next 10 years, so by 2034 the cost as like the population of cost estimators, would decline by 4% and that's in the same background where over 50% Percent of projects claim to have experienced delays from staffing gaps, right? So how can those things both be true? And the answer is because estimators, just like everybody else, have been getting or every, every white collar profession, at least, like the ones who aren't literally hands on tools, and even them, to some degree, like technology, has made them so much more efficient, you know, to the extent that an estimator 30 years ago would need to literally open a book and look for the thing that they are attempting to get, like, a unit rate for, yeah, and put it into a spreadsheet, you know, an electronic spreadsheet. Sure, 30 years ago, we definitely had those, but you're still, like, you're building it from scratch. You're getting the information from a book you're probably looking at, like, you know, when I was first hired at f and g, the estimators still had drafting tables right at their workstations, which are cool, but they're very cool. Yes, yeah. Like, man did, did offices lose something when workstations stopped being special? No more teak desks?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 20:57

No, actually, when my so? Captain Habermeyer, yeah, we've talked about, of course, he had so all the military, like, Navy issued the the office furniture was all that, like, you know, the metal kind of the Nate chair, like, yeah, 70s kind of postmodern look, yeah, the desks were that metal kind of, like, yeah, I don't know, I don't know how to describe them, but they look awesome,

Albert Brier: 21:25

yeah, so it's, it's as well inside Crimson Tide, I probably would, I mean,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 21:30

it smells like machine oil, yeah, yeah. I mean, actually, subs do, I mean, I Yes, I've been on subs.

Unknown: 21:37

Thank you very much. But you drove a sub famous I

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 21:40

did, and I do have that picture, I'm gonna find it someday. What you're describing is kind of like as I was preparing for this. An example would be like radiology, right? Like we've tested AI can sort of help read an x ray better than, in many cases, an actual radiologist, because they're able to spot trends and sort of patterns in the X ray, and so AI is starting to do some of their job and helping them. Either hospitals hire less of them, or they're doing better, higher perform, like higher value work, but that's kind of what you're describing.

Albert Brier: 22:23

It is, well, it is, but I think there's a key point to be made here, and it's one that we've made many times, but there is some research on this. It's nascent. I don't have the numbers in front of me, and it has yet to be like, you know, widely repeated across universities, you know, worldwide. But the basic finding was, if you give three groups of people the same problem to solve, and you tell group one you cannot use AI and group two, you must exclusively use AI and group three, you must use a combination of yourself and AI. Which group do you think performs the best? Probably the combo, the combo, right? Yeah, and it's not even close. Now, which group do you think performs the worst?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 23:05

Probably the only AI. No, it's both of them equally. Oh, only AI and

Albert Brier: 23:11

and only themselves. They perform equally badly in different ways. Now, you know, feel free to fact check me on this. Go, go. Look this up. There's some neat stuff to be read about this, but the point to be made is one that I've personally experienced, like, if I just throw a problem to AI and like, it's garbage, you out, it's garbage out. Yeah, exactly right. And so you know, anything that was trained on predominantly the entire contents of Reddit and Quora is going to be a little bit sketchy, right? And that's what most of those llms are based on, by the way. So if you were wondering why it occasionally reads like a Reddit comment, it's because it likely is a Reddit a comment. Yeah. So the point there is that for every nugget of gold, there's going to be a pile of dirt, right? Yep. So sifting through the dirt to find the gold is the job of a seasoned professional. So you can do a lot of the analysis piece. You can do a lot of the document control piece. And like document creation, like right now I'm writing a comprehensive suite of procedure upgrades for one of our clients. And in the good old days, I would have had to do all that myself. Now I can get a first draft from an AI, 1020, times faster, but

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 24:23

that's after you've given it like a basic rough sort of outline. Oh, you're actually in high quality, 100%

Albert Brier: 24:31

and right? What it takes away from me, like zero words from a final document that I present to a client will have come from an AI. They all pass through the Albert filter first, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 24:40

So, which is funny, you say that because remember, even yesterday, when I sent you that that thing, I wrote some words, and you came back and said, It sounds like AI. And I was like, I went through every single word, yeah? And I write like, AI now, yeah, like, it's but, but you make a key point. Nate, and that's the combo, yes, are the ones that are gonna

Albert Brier: 25:03

Well, what's funny is, like, I said what? That's particular example. I did say to you that it sounded like it was written by AI, but I also said it's pretty good.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:11

You gave it an out. You did say it was good. That was actually your first comment was, like, it's good. I like it, or something like that. That's right, Nate, you're amazing. Was also in there, yeah. Nate might have been Dave. You're amazing.

Albert Brier: 25:22

I think, I think I said Nate, and then maybe I said Dave later, but I definitely said you were very handsome and cool, right? Yes. So happened, yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:30

And you need to tell my kids that, because they give me an example where AI saved you time. I think you were starting to talk about some of those things, yeah.

Albert Brier: 25:41

I mean, I can't think of an example of, like, work that I've done recently where I didn't use AI to save me time. I use it all the time, and, like I said, 0% of the words and deliverables that I present to clients are written by AI, but they're all informed by AI because they've gotten so much better at research. Like a lot of the research that we're citing for this episode was aggregated by Claude, with the research function and

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:09

deep thinking and then vetting, and then we after that, yep, it just speeds it up.

Albert Brier: 26:14

Right? Speeds it up so we can come up with highly 87% of our statistics are accurate. Nate, did you know

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:20

that 60% of the time it works all the time, exactly.

Albert Brier: 26:24

So that was a fun, fun joke. But the point is that, like, even just this episode of this podcast is informed pretty heavily by AI, right? Not because I don't know what I'm talking about, or couldn't have found this information by self, because I'm busy, and it's so much faster to do this, and it's a lot cheaper for us if we don't have to hire a researcher, right? Because, like you and I, can do vetting.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:47

So I have an idea totally unrelated. We're going on tangent, and then we'll go back to this. We should develop AI Albert AI Nate, and then the two of them should get together and host a podcast. You know, could you imagine that, like the two AIS of, you know, our voices and like,

Albert Brier: 27:05

but research tells us Nate that that podcast will be just as bad as this one. Yeah, yeah. So what we actually need is AI Nate to host with real Albert, and for real Nate to host with AI, yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 27:19

that would be So, what is the so this whole conversation about, AI like, what's the impact it's having on this shortage?

Albert Brier: 27:25

Well, the shortage is less of a problem than it was, say, five years ago, right? Because I think so. Because your average, first off, you know, it used to be true that one one project, one planner, right? This is largely because I was working on larger projects. So you need at least one planner, maybe a couple of supporting schedulers to go, you know, like, help boots on the ground, stuff, like, do some of the data work and whatnot. Now it's more like four projects, one planner or five or six or 10, right? So people are being asked to multitask. I don't think that's helping their quality at all, but that's a different topic.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 28:05

But you know, it's funny that you say that, like, even my kids, right, they're on it's not necessarily AI, but like, my daughter is looking at, I don't know, she's creating a birthday list on Pinterest or something, and I'm talking to her, and she's actually responding. And I don't know how she's doing both things that at the same time, like, she's, she's actually responding to me, like, are we evolving as a species? Like, who knows, but it's funny. You make that distinction, because it's weird, right? Like, the whole multi tasking, like, is it bad? Is it good? Like, you know, well,

Albert Brier: 28:37

most of transition, most of the research on multitasking, leads, to two conclusions, right? One, yeah, it's bad, like it doesn't do anything good for your quality. It doesn't do anything good for your attention span. It doesn't actually improve your productivity all that much. And the reason why is because most people aren't actually multitasking. They are sequentially tasking, so task switching all the time, and think, Oh, I'm getting so many things done. I'm doing this, I'm doing that, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, but they're not doing all those things at once. They're doing one and then the other, and then switching back, and then switching back again. And we know from from other research that you know that kind of task switching can kill your productivity by up to 30%

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 29:11

Yeah, you're not actually producing anything, as you say, yeah, so,

Albert Brier: 29:14

and that's that's a real concern when, when you have people who are so massively multi tasked as part of their professional expectations, right? Like, you know, I mentioned, we're doing a procedure rewrite. Some of the the planner schedulers who work for this client have 1215, projects on the go, and that's, that's just too many, right? Because, like I said earlier, if you're going to be a decent planner or risk analyst, then you need to have some knowledge of the scope, right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 29:40

What are we talking about? Like, can you just, I don't know, somehow quantify what that means, like, 12 projects like, what? What is that? Well, I mean,

Albert Brier: 29:48

the only reason why it's even possible, and this gets back to your original question, is because the technology has improved so much, right? So what it really means is that a person is doing the the minimum effort required. Required to meet standards and practices for their trade in that role, at that client, or at that you know, company, whatever right what is that minimum depends on the client. But generally speaking, for a scheduler, it means that you have received an update in some form from the field. You've processed that update into, say your p6 schedule. You produce your percents, complete your actuals. You jam that up into the cloud. Let the Reporting Suite do its thing. You take a look at the report, make sure it doesn't say anything too insane. You write up some narratives about it. You do your variance explanations. You toss it to your Pm for review, and then you move on to the next one. And you can do that almost as fast as I just said it, right? Not absolutely that fast, because doing the data entry part, and this is the reason why a lot of schedulers are confused for data entry people, because a big chunk of their job is data entry, and there's no getting away from that, really, right? But it's the part of the job that is a, the most time consuming and be the most vulnerable to automation in the future, right? So as soon as those kinds of updates start getting reliably produced by some kind of machine intelligence or automatic data capture from the field or a synthesis of other existing systems and producing schedule updates, or, you know, God forbid, what if critical path method scheduling dies like I think that it's in a slow decline right now. I think that we're watching it die in real time and when, when companies start to walk away from critical path method scheduling, and you don't need a p6 schedule anymore, that means you also don't need somebody feeding the beast with data. You'll get that data from somewhere else. So the number of required planners and schedulers is likely to go down even as the number of projects that they're expected to execute goes up. It's a it's a complex framework that we're dealing with here. There's a lot going on in the landscape, but we doesn't mean we need to stop training new planners, right? Because, you know, 10,000 boomers are retiring daily in the US, a survey of people who have recently taken a new job found that 3% of them believe that knowledge transfer from their predecessor was adequate. Wow, 3% Wow. So you know, and it can take three to five years to get good at something like this, you know, like the famous Malcolm Gladwell, the 10,000 hours, right, right? Well, if you're, if you have a full time job, that's about 2000 hours a year. 10,000 hours is five years, folks.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:30

Wow, yeah. So you said something before about risk analysts commanding, like, salary premiums. I was hoping you could, like, expand on that. So you said that risk analysts command sort of a 20 to 40% if I got that right premium over sort of general project controls, and you've identified risk is kind of being one of the areas that are being hurt the most. Like, what? What does that mean? Like, what's that premium?

Albert Brier: 32:55

People are happy to pay that premium, because when they get a capable risk analyst, you know, someone who's really seasoned and knows their stuff. They're also getting a capable planner, scheduler, they're also getting a capable cost estimator. They're getting a person who can wear a lot of hats.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:10

It's a full package. Basically, it's a full package triple

Unknown: 33:13

threat, yes, yeah, it's a real sign triple threat,

Albert Brier: 33:20

because you're a fan of 1930 cinema, of

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:22

course, maybe, yep, yeah. So am I? I don't know.

Albert Brier: 33:27

I don't know. Let's find out. Let's Yeah. Let's do movie night anyway. Yeah, you get somebody who what's your favorite all over movie, Albert, what's your favorite? My favorite movie? Oh, my God,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 33:38

mine's Army of Darkness. I'm gonna wear it. That is a solid choice. Anyways. Okay, so, yeah. So the premium, the premium,

Albert Brier: 33:46

the premium is because you're, you know, talking about the the five years to get good at one thing. Well, a risk analyst isn't good at one thing. They have to be good at everything. Yeah. So your, your average, really capable risk analyst, you know, who can run a QRA by themselves and speak with some intelligence and force about risk and scheduling and all that other stuff. That person probably has 10, 1215, years experience, you know, like I'm sitting here talking to you with 17 years, right? So you know, and I feel like I got pretty good at the quantitative risk analysis thing, maybe five months ago, like, month ago.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 34:21

Yeah. How long does it take to hire a risk analyst here at dokanish?

Albert Brier: 34:25

Well, we haven't tried, like, the only one we've ever hired is Roger. So again, Hey Roger, how you doing? Man? Hey Roger, yeah, he's literally the only experienced risk analyst we've ever hired. And there's, there's exactly one other person that's been on our, like, immediate to hire list, and, and you'll never guess how we found

Unknown: 34:43

that guy. Flares, Roger trained him, of course. Yeah.

Albert Brier: 34:47

Flares, yeah, exactly. Smoke signals,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 34:55

Albert, let's just wrap this all up. What's your one piece of advice for our listeners? With regard to the shortage, yeah,

Albert Brier: 35:01

I actually have two, right? So if you are a junior, I know No, I know No, just one. Nate. Nate is shaking his head ruefully at No, right now. Okay, so how about this one piece of advice

Unknown: 35:13

for Nope, you can get, I will allow it. Okay, all right, I promise

Albert Brier: 35:17

it'll make sense. It's one piece of advice depending on who you are. So if you are an experienced, you know, Project controls professional, like myself, or, you know, Roger again, Hey, man, how you doing? If you're an experienced project controls professional, then my piece of advice is, expect to do a lot of training to get a decent project controls professional. Be a good trainer if you want to have good teammates at your disposal, because it's not necessarily true that you're just going to be able to go to the market and magic up a project controls team. I have found that very much not to be true over the past few years. Like our filtration system, goes from 1000s of applicants to two or three who get interviews to none that we hire a lot of the time, right? So we can't count on hiring people. We have to train them. So, you know, if you are a seasoned professional looking to staff up a team, you better get hiring so you can start training those people right now, you know? And so that brings me to my advice for brand new people getting into things, right? And actually, this is advice. This is a piece of advice that Claudette Smith from Hess Corporation gave when we were when we were asking at ACE, remember, yeah. So Claudette said, Find a mentor. That was the best advice you could possibly give to somebody like find somebody to latch on to and learn from, who knows what you want to know and find out how they got there. Walk in their footsteps, but don't walk too deeply in their footsteps. You know. Don't hold to that so strongly that you wind up being 10 years ago's best risk analyst. You want to be 10 years from now's best risk analyst. So you have to take the lessons from that experienced mentor and mate them up with all of the new technology and new skills and experience and the changing project landscape to create a new kind of project controls, professional one that is AI literate from jump, right, like I had to learn how to use it as the technology was developing. Well, somebody entering the workforce in five years, they're going to enter with a mature suite of AI driven technologies and super advanced machine learning data analytics at their disposal. So what are you going to do with that? Like you have, you know, a massive stockpile of incredible stuff at your experience or at your fingertips? What are you going to do with it? Right? So you need to start thinking along those lines, like, I'm not saying every project controls person needs to boil down to being an analyst, because that's not enough, right? You need somebody who can take that analysis and test it against real world. This is something that Ben flyberg is really big on, like, your best idea is useless if it hasn't been tested, right? So, you know, take the data analytics, go out there and into the field and test them right? Make sure that what you're thinking is going to work, does work, and when you figure and by the way, learning that something doesn't work is just as good as learning that something does work. Okay, so test your ideas. Be a thought leader, but not in the I'm on LinkedIn. I'm doing a thought leadership post kind of way, but in a way of like, no, no, I've been down this road. I know how this works. I know how this goes. Oh, I know how to use that tool. Oh, this, have I heard of replet? You bet I've heard of replet. I use it to build these five things, you know that kind of thing, right? Right?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:31

There, there, get there. You have it, folks, yeah, learn to use replet. We have a love hate relationship. Me and replied, yeah, yeah. All right, man, thanks. Albert. Thank you.

Albert Brier: 38:41

Nate. Hey everybody. It's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative, and above all else, inspires you to excellence in what you do. If you like today's episode, don't forget to rate, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners just like you. I'd also like to thank Thompson, Igbo, for letting us use his excellent music on our show. If you like what you hear, check him out@igbomusic.com that's E, G, B, O music.com talk to you later. So I ran out of things to say about that. Nate, I'm going to be honest with you, fair enough i.