Building a Better Workforce

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A big thank you to Autodesk, the sponsor of Engineering Influence at this year's convention.
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Autodesk partners with the AEC industry and its leaders to shape a more connected,
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data-driven future, empowering engineers to work more intelligently and to make
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confident decisions to drive meaningful impact.
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This enables firms to evolve, stay competitive, and deliver stronger business
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outcomes, all while designing a better world.
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So thank you again to Autodesk.
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Welcome to the Engineering Influence Podcast from the American Council of Engineering
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Companies coming to you from our 2026 Convention and Legislative Summit in Washington, D.C.
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And I'm very pleased to be joined on the program today by Chad Klinens,
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the CEO of Zweig Group. Chad, thank you very much for joining us.
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It's great to be here. Thank you.
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So tell us a little bit about yourself, Zweig Group, how you've kind of gone
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from the engineering side into the business side of the industry. Sure.
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Well, it's kind of neat. This morning, right before the opening session,
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I ran into a guy that was on the very first day of my very first job 32 years
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ago in the engineering industry. So that's the neat thing about these events.
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It brings people back. Brings everybody back together. Yeah.
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So 32 years of experience in what I would call AEC. I'm a civil engineer. Mm-hmm.
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And so I spent the first 18 years starting in kind of heavy infrastructure design,
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but really got into strategy and marketing brand strategy, growth strategy, as soon as I can.
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I always loved the business side of the profession.
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And that ultimately led me to 14 years ago joining Zwei Group.
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And I knew a lot about Zwei Group as a recognized brand in the industry.
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The founder had moved to my hometown. Oh, there you go. Convenient.
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Yeah, yeah. You know, the company was started in Boston in 1988,
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moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, the university there.
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And so 14 years ago, started talking to him and one thing led to another.
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Ended up moving back to my hometown and helping write the second chapter of Zweig Group.
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That's a great, I mean, that is fantastic. I mean, just the fact you were able
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to go kind of full circle and kind of come back to your hometown.
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Yeah. What was the thing that really sparked the idea about going into more
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of the business development and marketing side of it from the strict civil engineering side?
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What kind of what was the first spark and opportunity that allowed you to kind of go in that direction?
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Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think it was really just,
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I've always been observant, like the business side, the people side,
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and was just inspired by kind of the everything else, right,
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of an engineering career.
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And so I've described this in some of the marketing audiences.
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I said I had to kind of claw my way into marketing, but loved the brand,
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building a brand, a company that people were attracted to.
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And so that was really the spark that probably happened in the early 2000s,
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you know, early in my career. Yeah.
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I had a tremendous mentor with the firm that I grew up in, essentially spent 14 years at.
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And I'll just mention him because I think it's really important because he helped
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inspire what became the mission statement of Zwei Group, which is Elevate the Industry.
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And it was actually, I remember it vividly, it was a luncheon that we would
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do typically late in May after we would welcome the new graduates of engineers
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to our engineering firm.
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And, you know, he just said in front of everybody, he goes, you know,
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they don't make TV shows and movies
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about engineers like they do ERs and doctors and all of those things.
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He said, but what we do is so critical and important to the world. Yeah.
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And it was that statement that about eight years later...
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I was thinking, okay, what do we want to do as an organization?
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Elevate the industry, right? Like make it more attractive to kids coming out
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of school. And that's what I love about the alignment between our mission and
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what ACEC does and why it's so important for us to be here.
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Yeah, and that's a good transition point because really what we've done is,
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especially through the institute, the ACEC Research Institute and ACEC also,
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is just try to work on how do we elevate the industry?
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How do we encourage firms to develop the systems and the processes,
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the policies that encourage the next generation of engineers to join the workforce
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and also to give more people a voice at the table?
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Right. Right. And I think that that was really the impetus behind really the
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community building roadmap, which is something that's been going on for a couple of years now.
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Now, for anybody out there who's not completely familiar with that,
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kind of give us a description of what that is and how that fits in with what you're doing with AC.
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Yeah, so I want to describe the community roadmap in a little bit of a different
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way, because anybody that's listening to this podcast can go look it up.
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Certainly, it's a benchmarking platform, right?
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Now, it's changed names, or I guess maybe it's evolved over the years, was the DEI plus B.
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Roadmap, evolved to the community roadmap, but essentially it is a data collection
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and then insights delivery platform, something that we know well at Zwei Group,
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our founder helped pioneer that a long, long time ago.
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And so I think what's really important is this profession loves data, right?
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When we have data, then we can do something about it.
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But the key is we have to do something about it. Yes.
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So data by itself doesn't really help us unless we do something with it to drive actionable change.
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And that's the one thing that I really loved about this platform when I was
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first introduced to it years ago is that it has the word roadmap in it, right?
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So essentially it communicates it to journey, starting point,
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and you're going someplace better. Yeah.
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I think that's important because it is a benchmarking tool.
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It allows you to kind of take, as a firm, a hard look at what you offer from.
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A perspective of bringing a more diverse workforce into your form or seeing
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exactly where you stand at the moment.
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Ask those questions, but then also collect the data set to actually start looking
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at how you are in, not just in the industry, but also in your size of a firm
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and kind of where you are in the marketplace.
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And then set those metrics to actually move forward.
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Well, and that's key. And I'll say that that's one of the things that attracted
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me to join Mark Zweig 14 years ago is that, you know, if you go back to the
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late 80s, you know, Zweig Group, and of course then it was known as Swag White, but,
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There really wasn't a resource that was dedicated to just architecture and engineering firms.
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I mean, there were several, but we were one of the first that really,
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I would say, pioneered giving data,
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and the detail to, like, for instance, a 70-person engineering firm in Denver,
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Colorado could find data and say, well, is the exact work I do in the exact market, am I.
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High profit? Am I low profit? Yeah. Am I growing?
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Am I stagnant? You know, and I think those benchmarks are very important.
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So you fast forward to today and beyond financial metrics, and those things
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are all very important, right?
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But we have a lot more insights on, like, the employee experience,
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which this platform does a great job of.
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And in a tight labor market where everybody's competing for talent,
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and it's a very, very tight pipeline, which we're trying to fix.
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But for right now, if you're trying to get talent, you have to make sure that
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you're differentiating yourself from the competition to actually attract and
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then retain that talent when it gets there. Right.
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And there are a lot of questions and things that C-suite needs to take into
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consideration to actually create
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the environment that allows you to be successful in tallying position.
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Right. What are you seeing in the numbers? I mean, what's sticking out to you
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most in the recent results from Q2?
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Well, a couple of things. And, you know, first of all, let's just acknowledge
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that there's been headwinds. Oh, of course. Yeah. A lot.
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Unexpected headwinds that, yeah, that we didn't really take into consideration
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at the outset of the roadmap. Yeah. And so I will say what's encouraging is
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engagement is still high in the platform.
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And in fact, you're seeing some progression, right?
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So you can tell that some of those firms that have maybe taken it a couple of
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times, they're now progressing and maybe moving from aspiring to emerging or something.
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And there's still a lot that are kind of clustered in those early, early categories.
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But of course, it's sometime that the goal is to optimize, right?
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That's the journey that firms are trying to get to. So I would say two things,
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engagement and progress. Yeah, that's good.
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Yeah. Now, I guess from the perspective of the firms that haven't,
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taken the path on the roadmap, haven't taken part in the roadmap,
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you know, what would you tell them as far as the elevator pitch on why they
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should take the time and effort to actually get them on the path of the roadmap,
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start collecting data, and then start benchmarking?
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Yeah, well, it'll go back to really, I think, if we just define what it is.
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And again, let's forget all the noise that has been created around this effort.
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And let's talk about what it is at its core.
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It is a recruiting and retention tool, right?
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I mean, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to maximize recruitment
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and retention to this industry. That's what elevate the industry.
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At its core, it's a recruiting retention, right? We want to attract people to
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the industry, help solve the workforce problems.
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That's exactly what this tool does. It gives data to a firm to say, here's where we are.
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And again, that by itself isn't what it's all about. It's taking that and saying,
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okay, how do we work this into our strategic plan?
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How do we work this into our recruiting messaging, into our marketing client messaging?
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But not only that, just how do we bring it to light?
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Where there's actual processes and structure where the business model actually
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evolves in response to the data that we're getting.
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Yeah. And again, it's taking the politics out of the situation.
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That's right. It's noise. It's unnecessary. It's a business decision.
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Right. It's a question of we have
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to compete for the same talent pool that everybody else is competing in.
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Right. The talent pool requires or demands certain things. Is the firm set up
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to actually meet those demands? Can we get to talent?
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What do we have to do to get talent, retain it, and grow it?
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This is an actual roadmap that allows you to put yourself on that,
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path towards figuring out exactly what goes into your point i mean this is not
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a a one and done thing this is this is information that can inform a strategic
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plan strategic investments uh where the firm is going to be going into the future,
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well and you know i think it's interesting as we we sit here in dc and and we're
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we're you know halfway through the day here on monday yeah all of the talk about
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AI technology innovation, right?
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So, but what that highlights is the competition for, like for myself, civil engineer.
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You go back to when I graduated, you know, what did you do?
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You had several different paths you could go on. Now, civil engineer can be
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recruited by Google. Yeah. Right.
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They want anybody that's technically minded. And so now our competition for
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the workforce is even more fierce. Exactly. And the pipeline's not increasing, right? We know that.
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So it's up to us to drive that pipeline and show the world what an amazing profession
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engineering is, but also welcoming profession.
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Now, it's a really good point that you raise because the competition for talent,
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everybody focuses in on what engineering firms are competing against themselves.
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And that's not the case because it is the way that you're trained to think.
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It is the number of companies outside of the traditional e-space are.
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Kind of entering into that, right, and seeing what, through technology,
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AI, everything else, that they can kind of come into.
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Right. And that's all competing for the same talent. So, yeah,
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you have to, when you're a firm of any size, you're competing with the big guys,
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the Googles, the Metas, the people who are actually starting to get into the
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question of physical infrastructure, data centers, the support of data center construction.
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All of that is going to be supported by the engineering industry,
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and they're going to look for that talent.
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Yeah, absolutely. And there's no relief on the pressure, I don't think,
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in my lifetime. Yeah, absolutely. So any firm out there that has not yet done
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the benchmark, where should they go to actually take advantage of that?
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So go to ACEC's, the Research Institute's website, and they can find the roadmap
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link there. It's right there.
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And, yeah, I mean, just start the journey. Yeah, start the journey and unlock the results.
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Yeah, don't worry about like, oh, well, we may not score high.
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I don't, you know, whatever. Get in there, see where you are.
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Everybody has a starting point and start the journey.
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It's best to be on the road towards the destination than to be too afraid to
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take this first step. Right.
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So that's really important. So, Chad, thank you for joining us on the program. I really appreciate it.
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I look forward to having you back on as the roadmap continues to evolve.
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And encourage everyone out there to go on to the ACEC Research Institute website.
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Check out the roadmap if you haven't taken it yet. Please engage if you have. Continue to do it.
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And it's going to help the industry thrive in a time of increased competition. That's right.
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So, again, this has been the Engineering Influence Podcast from the American
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Council of Engineering Companies. And we'll see you next time.