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F R OM T H E F O U N D E R
Our industry is one of the best places for anyone to build a career, and we owe it to our children to expose them to the work we do early. Get your kids interested in AEC early
I have often said to anyone who will listen to me that I think the architecture and engineering “industry” is one of the best places for anyone to build a career. Firms in this business are often highly purpose-driven. Your companies are filled with intelligent, ethical, and creative people. And your people are “doing good” for our society, filling a very useful role. Your architecture and engineering firms help give all of us better places to live, work, learn, heal, and make things. You give us clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, efficient transportation systems of all kinds. Yours is important work!
Mark Zweig
At the same time, we are facing (and have been for some time) huge talent shortages. We desperately need more people with design, technical, and business skills in our industry. Most firm principals have children. We tend to be middle-aged by the time we start our own businesses or become principals of existing firms. A thought occurred to me recently that it’s possible we may be looking past one of the most fertile fields for new talent there is – our own kids. My mom (she is still living in her own home at 101) supported my interests in this stuff when I was just a little kid. When I was only 8 or 9 years old, she took
me to our local library and found books of house designs that I could check out. I created my own designs on graph paper and then built them to scale out of legos. I thought I wanted to be an architect until I developed early success in my childhood entrepreneurial endeavors and got seduced by that. So I got two degrees in business and came back to my childhood interests at 22, and have worked in this industry ever since. My oldest daughter, Christy, is now 34 and has been a part of this industry since she was a young woman. She grew up listening to talk about business at
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER MARCH 7, 2022, ISSUE 1431
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