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ASHRAE Journal Podcast Episode 45

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ASHRAE Journal Podcast Dennis Knight Interview

Dennis Knight, P.E., Fellow Life ASHRAE Member, 2024-25 ASHRAE President

Empowering Our Workforce With Dennis Knight

Join hosts Matt Walters, Associate Member ASHRAE, and Allison Hambrick, ASHRAE Journal Assistant Editor, for a discussion with 2024–25 ASHRAE President Dennis Knight about this term’s ASHRAE Society theme “Empowering Our Workforce: Building a Sustainable Future” and what’s next for the HVAC&R industry.

Have any great ideas for the show? Contact the ASHRAE Journal Podcast team at podcast@ashrae.org

Interested in reaching the global HVACR engineering leaders with one program? Contact Greg Martin at 01 678-539-1174 | gmartin@ashrae.org.

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  • Guest Bio

    M. Dennis Knight, P.E., Fellow, Life Member ASHRAE, is ASHRAE’s president for the 2024-25 term. Knight previously served on the ASHRAE Board of Directors as president-elect, treasurer, vice president and director-at-large. He has also served as an ASHRAE Distinguished Lecturer, chair of the International Standards Advisory Subcommittee and vice chair of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force, among other extensive involvement.

    For his time and dedication to ASHRAE and the industry, Knight is the recipient of the ASHRAE Distinguished Service Award, Exceptional Service Award, Regional Service Award and the ASHRAE Research Promotion “Top Dog” Award.

    The theme for the 2024-25 ASHRAE Society Year is “Empowering Our Workforce: Building a Sustainable Future.”

    “We all want to be involved in a career that we can be passionate about and where we can find meaning and purpose. We need to demonstrate to the world what we do and the impact that our industry is making today and is capable of producing in the future to address climate change. Together, we can grow the ranks of committed and passionate professionals and shape the future of our industry and our planet.”

    Knight’s theme highlights the emergence of new technologies to the HVAC&R and building sciences and how ASHRAE will play a pivotal role in ensuring that the workforce remains adaptive and forward-thinking. “Today, rapidly changing technology and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) are transforming the building science industry and presenting numerous career opportunities. By strategically leveraging the power of technology alongside the power of human creativity, both experienced professionals and new talent can collaborate to drive progress within our entire industry. Every ASHRAE member can be a messenger and an ambassador.”

    He is the founder of Whole Building Systems, LLC, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina and his experience in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of high performance buildings spans over 46 years. Knight has commissioned hundreds of new buildings and audited or retro-commissioned over 100 million square feet of existing commercial, federal and industrial building stock. He introduced Building Information Modeling (BIM) to a 30-person architectural firm in the early 2000’s and provided whole building energy simulation analysis. 

    Knight frequently lectures in the U.S. and abroad on high performance building tools and technology and has authored numerous publications and white papers on a variety of technical topics. He has developed curriculum and teaches on BIM, integrated building design, life cycle cost analysis, ASHRAE 90.1 and IECC energy code compliance, energy management for historic structures in hot and humid climates and energy modeling and commissioning of energy using systems.

    He is a graduate of the College of Charleston with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and holds dual registration in South Carolina as a Mechanical Engineer and Fire Protection Engineer.

  • Hosts Bio

    Allison Hambrick AJP Headshot

    Allison Hambrick, ASHRAE Journal Assistant Editor

    An avid comic book fan since the first time she read "Stan Lee's Soapbox," Allison Hambrick is Atlanta’s friendly neighborhood generalist writer. She graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Writing and Film in 2020. Allison has a varied background in the fields of journalism, healthcare, and entertainment, having previously worked for Disney and Warner Bros., before joining the ASHRAE Journal team as an assistant editor and podcast producer. In her free time, she enjoys reading, video game design, travelling, and spending time outside with her dog, Loki. Allison is fluent in movie quotes, and her favorite film is Superman II.

    Matt Walters AJP Headshot

    Matt Walters, Associate Member ASHRAE

    Matt Walters, Associate Member ASHRAE, is a Senior Automation Systems Engineer with over 10 years of experience in Facility O&M, Commissioning, HVAC, Stationary Engineering, and Building Automation. He has a diverse working background from mission-critical facilities to K-12 and much in-between, spanning six climate zones. Currently, Matt leads McKinstry’s Florida Remote Operations Center, where his team enhances the effectiveness of client O&M staff and optimizes the performance, efficiency, and longevity of mechanical systems for nearly 29 million square feet of infrastructure in the Tampa Bay area. A member of ASHRAE since 2021, Matt is currently Chair of Government Affairs for the Florida West Coast chapter, Chair of the Research Subcommittee for TC 7.2, and an active member of TC 1.4. His long-term mission is to safeguard the future of our nation’s infrastructure and built environment for the well-being of its citizens and the environment.

  • Transcription

    ASHRAE Journal:

    ASHRAE Journal presents:

    Allison Hambrick:

    Hello, and welcome to this episode of ASHRAE Journal Podcast. My name is Allison Hambrick, assistant editor at ASHRAE Journal, and I'm joined by co-host Matt Walters, senior technology solutions engineer at McKinstry.

    Matt, how are you?

    Matt Walters:

    I'm doing very well, Allison. Thank you. How are you?

    Allison Hambrick:

    I'm good, thank you. All right, today we are speaking with Dennis Knight, ASHRAE's president for the 2024-2025 term. How are you, sir?

    Dennis Knight:

    I'm doing great, Allison. And hello, Matt.

    Matt Walters:

    Howdy, Dennis.

    Allison Hambrick:

    Thank you for joining us. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about your professional journey?

    Dennis Knight:

    Yeah, sure. Thanks, Allison. I informed people when I started my presidential address in Indianapolis that my wife and I are celebrating 50 years of marriage this year. And coupled with that though is I'm celebrating 50 years of working in the buildings industry and 47 years with ASHRAE as a volunteer. This has been a great way to celebrate the career and also celebrate the path through ASHRAE with our friends and colleagues in ASHRAE all around the world.

    But just to give you a little bit more about my early career and beginnings first, I began as a technician and a designer and then later on got the motivation to obtain a degree and become a registered engineer and business owner. And that business experience included design, construction, management, and ownership of a couple of companies. That career path also has a parallel ASHRAE journey path. As I progressed through from a designer at my first employment with a large power company designing piping systems for nuclear power plants where I had great employer support for education and training, and then next to an HVAC consultant where I had great employer support for both ASHRAE and outside learning to increase my skills and proficiency at the work they needed to be done. And so as I went through that, I probably would still be with that employer had they not relocated an office and wanted to transition or transfer me away from Charleston, South Carolina, and Charleston is where we wanted to live and make our home, that's after about 10 years in the industry I decided to join forces with an electrical engineer and start our own business.

    That said, we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but through ASHRAE, that second employer pretty much handed me an ASHRAE application right along with the job application and sat down and explained to me the values of belonging to ASHRAE and participating in ASHRAE and how those values trickled back down to value to that company and to that employer. I started off in Student Affairs right off the bat and as a local chapter chair, and then worked my way through the chapter chairs, holding the chairs and coming up, and then served as president twice as a volunteer at the chapter level. Then moved up to the regional level where I worked in the Research Promotion Committee both as a research promotion chair at the chapter and then a RVC for the region, and then ultimately working through the chairs in the RP committee at society and ultimately chaired the RP Committee. That was my stepping stone to the board of directors as a director at large and then ultimately as a vice president of the board and then treasurer, president-elect, president. That's the path that I followed within ASHRAE on the grassroots side to get to the opportunity of serving as president of ASHRAE.

    Now, on the technical side, right along the time I was beginning to serve as the research promotion chair, I also got nudged by a couple of prior ASHRAE presidents, Ron Jarnagin and Terry Townsend to jump in on the technical side. I was working with a lot of allied organizations like the Construction Specification Institute, U.S. Green Building Council, and some architects on some integrated building design processes. I became chair of TC 7.1, which is integrated building zone, and that led me to co-author chapter 57 of the ASHRAE Applications Handbook on Integrated Building Design. That was the first time that chapter had been published, which is pretty cool. From there, I was also an early adopter of building information modeling; began talking about it about 24 years ago. Chaired our BIM multidisciplinary task group, chaired our building performance analysis topical conference six times, and ultimately chaired our Standard Project Committee 224, which is the application of BIM that we wrote jointly with the National Institute of Building Science.

    Finally, before taking the leap to treasurer in the interim between serving on the board and being nominated as treasurer, I served as our vice chair for the Epidemic Task Force and got a wonderful amount of experience working with policy makers, working with members, working with various countries on helping them work through using their HVAC systems to mitigate the spread of infectious aerosols. And that ultimately led to us working with the White House and beginning the creation of ASHRAE Standard 241 on how to mitigate the spread of infectious aerosols using the HVAC system. That's a nutshell of my professional and my ASHRAE career paths to chew on for a little bit.

    Allison Hambrick:

    Thank you so much for sharing. Congratulations on becoming ASHRAE's president for the 2024-2025 term. Can you tell us a little bit more about the 2024-2025 ASHRAE Society theme, empowering our workforce building a sustainable future? And then what inspired you to choose this theme?

    Dennis Knight:

    Yeah, I had had this idea that if I were ever asked, nominated, or had the opportunity to serve at this level, and I'll be honest with you, that was not an aspiration when I joined ASHRAE. My goals when I joined ASHRAE and when I was working with that first employer was to become a professional engineer, own my own business and become an ASHRAE Fellow. I saw the ASHRAE Fellow membership grade as the penultimate of a career in the HVAC industry because it recognizes your body of work; not necessarily your service to ASHRAE, but the things you've done within the industry. The rise to treasurer then president-elect and president has just been icing on the cake and really just fulfilling for me.

    As you heard in that introduction, the employers I worked with provided great support for continuing education through in-house training, through ASHRAE Learning Institute courses and through some really generous tuition reimbursement programs. And I took that with me. Once I started my businesses, I offered the same benefits to our employees, right down to asking the receptionist to join ASHRAE and participate because I felt it was important for them to understand the business, understand the language and be able to open a conversation with a client on the phone and be knowledgeable and be able to point people in the right direction. Lifelong learning and workforce development and the value of developing people have been a passion of mine since the very start of my career. That employer support was invaluable.

    And in fact, that first employer, the power plant company that hired me as a drafter, as a technician before I was an engineer, they began investing in me and my career development a year and a half before I graduated from high school. I was one of those kids that didn't have any money to go to college, didn't have any guidance to go to college and didn't really understand the value of additional education, I was just ready to get out and go to work, start earning a paycheck. And so they showed me the value by beginning to develop me a year and a half, 18 months before I graduated from high school by offering to supplement some of my drafting classes and things like that to teach me power plant piping systems design and gave me that opportunity to enroll in college level courses and pay for them.

    Then my second employer, as I mentioned, just instilled in me the value of volunteering and working in ASHRAE and what that brought back to the company. The fact that I'm sitting in a room with the best and the brightest and most knowledgeable people in our industry, I'm learning my soft skills of communication and presentation. And I bring that back, and I'm a better employee, I'm a better interface with clients and with the industry manufacturers as well when I'm designing and selecting equipment and putting together systems and being able to communicate that to other people and get their ideas and incorporate it to build a better building.

    That's was the genesis of it. It maybe got a little bit of pushback because workforce development is such a big issue around the world. It's the number two issue to every country in the world other than national security. That was why I focused on it and why I'm passionate about it.

    Allison Hambrick:

    Amazing. Thank you so much. I certainly agree that workforce development is incredibly important. Matt, can you speak more to that?

    Matt Walters:

    Absolutely. Dennis, lot of things you touched on I think we have a lot of similarities. Obviously I'm much less farther along in my career, but I also had a little non-traditional path, unable to afford to finish college and willing to take on excessive debt. And so there's a lot of things that you mentioned that I really connect with and talking about the willingness to provide service back to the community through ASHRAE, especially in these times of need where we can see the way our infrastructure's going. And we know that continuing to do things the way we've been doing them, the status quo is not going to be sufficient. I think people having that sense of duty like you did to step up in a community like ASHRAE, ASHRAE is such an incredible community to provide service back to the communities around us I think is really critical. On the topic of workforce development, something that we're both very passionate about, both see a need, really, you could say it's the bottleneck of all other society themes that we could pick, is that. Why do you think this is important?

    Dennis Knight:

    Why do I think it's important? Well, number one, I believe in the industry and its impact. I believe that between heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigeration, we impact the lives, the health, the well-being of every single person on the planet. Whether they live, work, or play in a building or not. What we do from an energy efficiency standpoint, from an indoor air quality standpoint, from a food security standpoint, water security standpoint and carbon emissions standpoint, what we do improves the lives of all of humanity. It goes right to our mission.

    And that's what speaks to me. And that's why I participate in ASHRAE is it's bigger than me, it's bigger than our collective membership, it's bigger than our industry. It really does have an impact and help and benefit every person on the planet. And there's not too many industries out there that actually do that, especially when they're brought together and aggregated in a technology agnostic and a business or a non-proprietary way the way ASHRAE has done for the last 130 years.

    Matt Walters:

    Yeah, and I think also focusing importance on the ramifications of us not addressing these issues. We've seen the degradation of our infrastructure happen in more noticeable ways the last several years. A few years ago in Texas, we had that winter storm where the power grid essentially froze and hundreds of people lost power and there was some loss of life and loss of property. Recently we had some ductwork collapse in a resort in Colorado, which is an obvious issue. We've had train derailments in Ohio and we've had buildings in Florida. We're an HVAC& R focused organization, but it affects so much more than just air conditioning. Even the structure and the foundation of buildings, if your HVAC is not being properly taken care of, can be significantly impacted.

    In your own personal experience, what are some of the more surprising things that have really driven this issue to the top of your priority list?

    Dennis Knight:

    Oh, absolutely. Let's just go back to what I do every day, and then I'll bring it up to the Epidemic Task Force that really honed in and highlighted to the world, I believe, the need for better operations and maintenance. I do a lot of designs for K through 12 schools and higher education facilities, and most of it retrofit designs, so HVAC replacements, upgrades in existing buildings. And if you think about our challenges, the challenge is we've accepted to decarbonize the entire built environment by 2050, there are two and a half trillion square feet of existing buildings, and if you consider that the average size of a building is 20,000 square feet, that's a lot of buildings that need to be renovated. And they need to be renovated not only to be net-zero energy, net-zero carbon emissions, but number one to be healthy and safe.

    During the Epidemic Task Force, one of the things several of the large school districts in my region ask us to come in and help them do assessments. And the amount of deferred maintenance, the amount of systems that had been-the building automation systems had been turned off and were essentially just running 24/7 just because sensors had failed, coils were dirty, compressors was failed, and there was no money to fix them.

    To give you an example, probably looked at 750 to 1,000 dedicated outdoor air units, and not but 25% of them were still running. And if you can imagine the impact on productivity, on learning, on health, the spread of flu, forget the pandemic, just the spread of flu each year and what that does to a school district, and then that you take that home to parents, you take that home to grandparents, and then it trickles down into the economy because those parents and grandparents work places. Just again understanding the impact of our industry and the need to educate not just engineers but technicians, operators, maintenance people, teachers, administrators on the value of keeping these systems operating as we intended them. And the reason we do that, and it's all about health, safety and welfare, is a tremendous opportunity for ASHRAE to raise the profile of this industry and then train a lot of people.

    We're also going to triple the size of the industry, not in addition to the two and a half trillion square feet of buildings that need to be renovated over the next 25 years; we also will be building two and a half trillion square feet or the equivalent of one New York City every month for the next 25 years. And every one of those need to be healthy, safe, and carbon-neutral. And for the general public, for our policymakers, for homeowners and school administrators and grocery chain operators, hospital administrators, hospital operators, everyone needs to understand the value and the impact that having and keeping their HVAC systems working as they were designed and at optimal capacity and performance is so important to every person in that building.

    Matt Walters:

    It seems like we're really just starting to dip our feet in the water of the true impacts that can have on things like human health and safety in our environments. And we've made some fantastic strides during that COVID Task Force in the last several years, and we've got more to do.

    Thinking about you want to break down a problem, you want to know why is this important, then how severe is this problem? If we had to try to quantify, thinking about technicians and engineers retiring, the average age, who's coming in, who's coming out, how do you see the severity and the magnitude of this issue?

    Dennis Knight:

    This is an almost existential issue for the industry. Our global workforce, as essential as we are in meeting these challenges, hitting these targets, our global workforce is shrinking. We're not getting enough younger people; not just new people, but younger people, mid-career people into the industry. We're also, I think, not thinking outside of the box as to who could be an employment candidate or who could work in this industry. We need people from every single physical and life science. We need business people and we need trades people.

    There's a ratio, I think, of about five technicians work in the industry to every one engineer, so about 80% of our workforce is technicians. And if we're designing and laying out buildings and control systems that are perfectly designed, which they never are, as soon as we hand the keys over to the owner and the technicians that take care of it, if they're not informed, if they're not aware of the importance of their job on the ultimate goal, which is the health, safety, and welfare of the people that live, work, and play in those buildings, they're never going to maintain them and keep them working at optimum. Then add to that the fact that we're going to triple the size of the industry in 25 years from about two billion systems to six billion systems, technology and artificial intelligence is not going to supplement that existing workforce and get all that work done. We're going to need maybe not triple the number of people in this industry, but I'll guarantee you at least twice as many people using the latest technologies to make all this happen.

    Matt Walters:

    My background is primarily facility operations, and the second half of my career has been controls engineering and installation and operation. And when you spoke to having to pull from non-traditional skills and resources into our industry to make these solutions happen, it really spoke to me. From a master systems integration perspective, being a controls guy, we have all these new technologies to focus on: efficiency, decarbonization, operations. And if we look at what we talk about in our conferences even as some of the things we're still talking about with controls, some of it's stuff we've been able to do for decades, and we just, as an industry, haven't been able to reliably execute it at scale. And I think what you touched on with needing to pull in outside skills and perspectives is really important to that.

    It's like one of the things I look for in my controls people is I love to pull from computer science, from IT technology. It's such a saturated market with so much talent. Technology is one of our weaknesses. We'd make a lot of advancements, but as far as the integration and how they speak together is, I think, one of the weaknesses of our industry at scale, so I wholeheartedly agree. As far as trying to look at how are we going to solve this problem? We can think of short-term, we can think of long-term strategies. What do you think are some things that we can do in the short-term at an individual level and what can companies do and the industry as a whole? And how can we-at each other, what are some things we can do in the short-term?

    Dennis Knight:

    Sure. Let me go back and just comment on your last statement because it's powerful. There's a book out there by Ginni Rometty who was former CEO of IBM, and she runs a nonprofit now that focuses on workforce development. And she and computer science, the IT industries, and now Boeing and the auto manufacturers, they took it to heart years ago and they stripped out a lot of their degree requirements and things like that out of job descriptions where they felt like they were looking for aptitude as much as anything. And that wasn't specifically coordinated with a zip code that people with aptitude to learn their business and the techniques they needed within their business to advance, it existed in almost any discipline and in any walk of life and in any stage of career development. That's what when I say broaden our look or our cast-wider net of people that can do work in this industry and make a career in it.

    Now, as far as things we can do, at least as an ASHRAE president, I had the opportunity to work with the Treasurer's Advisory Committee and a President-Elect Advisory Committee on the run-up of beginning my year as president. We create a theme. And as you've heard, I had this idea of focusing on developing people and lifelong learning and workforce development for a long time. And what those two groups, the Treasurer's Advisory Committee in the PEAC, the President-Elect Advisory Committee, did was help me refine those thoughts and make them more relevant to the industry and make them more relevant to ASHRAE and what ASHRAE could do, how we could solve this problem.

    And one I mentioned was to raise our profile. We're great at engineering, but we're not great at selling, and so selling this industry with a lot of tech talk and a lot of geek talk and things like that doesn't resonate with high school students and college students and researchers and academics. They're looking more for how can I find meaning? How can I find purpose? How can I have an impact as I go to work in an industry and build a career around it?

    And so my focus on one of my first initiatives was something called the Career Conversations Campaign. And that was aimed to raise our profile and portray our industry to prospective employment candidates and people seeking to change the trajectory of their careers if they were working in another industry. And it's all about personal stories. People telling stories as to-I call it articulating our whys. Why is this a great career? Why is it essential to the health, safety, and welfare of people? And why is it essential to meeting our decarbonization and energy efficiency goals? And then finally, just why did I choose to work in this industry? Why are there people I want to work with and people I want to aspire to be like?

    And so we started this career conversation initiative that can be seen on the ashrae.org/president page at explaining those things. How am I having an impact? How am I finding meaning and purpose? And what am I doing in this industry? I started off part of the page with a short video when I had my "a-ha" moment standing inside an operating room and looking at both the patients and the surgeons and the surgical team and how I was protecting all of them by making sure that the HVAC systems were working correctly and that you had positive outcomes and that patient could walk out and see their family again and those nurses and surgeons could walk out without being infected with whatever the patient had. That caught on, and we got 26 volunteers from the Leadership Academy, young people in our leadership academy at ASHRAE last March who volunteered to create their own videos and tell their stories.

    And that led to creating a series of tools that are also published up there to help people work out their stories and then create their own videos. And that happens at the chapter level. People understanding how to tell their story, create their elevator speech of why they work in this industry, why it's important I felt was important to membership promotion, to Student Affairs and to the communities they serve and the policy makers they serve. If our members can make that connection with people outside the industry and our policy makers and have them understand the impact we're having now and the potential we have in the future, I feel like that initiative will have done its job. And now, since that original 27 videos, we've had 60 professionals from every stage of their career post these videos that are great tools for every chapter to use. And by the end of the year, I hope there are more than 100. I talk about them at every meeting and every chapter visit I do.

    Matt Walters:

    I've been in the HVAC industry myself for about 10 years, and I came up in the school of hard knocks and largely as a mechanic. I didn't know I was allowed to join an organization like ASHRAE. And for anyone that's maybe listening to this who's like, "Am I qualified to join this organization?" Something that Dennis touched on that I noticed myself is some of our smartest people who are heading our best technical committees and doing incredible science and engineering, oftentimes engineers tend to be introverted and they're not always good at delivering and conveying the power and the significance of that incredible work that they're doing. You may not think you're the best engineer, but we need all sorts of skills and types of people to be able to effectively not just create this incredible content, but to deliver it in a way that it can actually make an impact and be affected at scale and regulations and codes and whatever else we need to do.

    Dennis Knight:

    Yeah, I make it a point at every meeting I go to and every chapter visit to tell every person there, whether they joined ASHRAE or graduated from school last week or whether they've been in the industry 50 years like me, every single person sitting in that room is an expert at something. Every one of us got into the chair with a different level of experience, a different career path, and tomorrow when we go back to the office, we'll be a different person than we were when we attended that ASHRAE meeting. And we have the opportunity to share our lessons learned. That school of hard knocks, again, being a design-build contractor for 26 years, I've put in every system, broke it and had to fix it and get it working right again, so I know that school is very valuable from the standpoint. And being able to share that and help people avoid issues is a tremendous value to every person sitting in that room when you're having conversations with them and then giving you their own perspectives on, "Maybe you could have done this and done it even a little better." And being open to that kind of conversation is the value of ASHRAE.

    Allison Hambrick:

    I absolutely agree. From my experience interacting with members, part of what is amazing about ASHRAE is its ability to connect people within the industry at all levels of their career. That's extremely valuable because everybody has a unique perspective, and so I appreciate you mentioning your initiative regarding career connections.

    We talk about addressing workforce development at the individual level, the industry level, and a little bit at the society level. Can you tell us more about your other specific initiatives within ASHRAE to address workforce development?

    Dennis Knight:

    Sure. Well, I won't rehash the career conversations, but I'll just start with the second initiative. Part of the second initiative, and we had three initiatives. The second one was something called Member Resource Groups, or MRGs. And everybody knows ASHRAE needs another acronym. But the MRGs, we recognized that at summer and winter meetings, there were always new people. There were always people that had different situations, but not necessarily so different that they were unique, that there would be other people that had common circumstances or similar things in life going on that if they could talk about them with a similar group of people with common interest, they could learn from them, they could teach others and leave the meeting a better person, a better ASHRAE member, and a better employer. And so these member resource groups or MRGs, they help us solve problems and grow interaction between similar sets of ASHRAE members.

    Those MRGs, they're not new. We've called them other things over the years, but we've been very successful at creating member resource groups and things like Women in ASHRAE, Student Affairs. Every one of our technical committees, if you think about it, is a member resource group. It's a group of subject matter experts and interested parties that are convened around a similar topic in a non-proprietary way to try to have conversation, learn the best practices from each other and let that trickle in and be part of the next revision in the 130-year-old knowledge pool of ASHRAE through our handbooks, through our standards, through our guidelines.

    What they do is they give us an opportunity to develop those people. They create greater diversity, equity, inclusion. And I guess looking at the two groups we piloted in Indianapolis and we will continue in Orlando, we piloted a group called Young Professionals with Children or with Families, and we piloted a group, the New Members Club. We provided space for them to meet, a time that was on the schedule and published in the 365 app. And we had facilitators in the room to help guide the conversation and draw those introverts out and get them to speak and contribute to the conversation. And it was a tremendous success. We had great participation. The facilitators came away with some great reports. And we've turned that into they will be continued in Orlando the same two groups, but also creating this platform where if a group of individuals who have a similar set of issues they'd like to address with an ASHRAE, they can contact us, contact staff and find a place at an ASHRAE meeting where they can sit down, they can talk, come to some resolution or create some ideas that then can be passed on to the ASHRAE leadership or our grassroots committees to make ASHRAE in the industry better. That's the MRGs.

    And then lastly, our third initiative was really the heart of the theme, which is professional development. What we're doing, as I mentioned, my employer began investing in and committed to me a year and a half before I graduated from high school. We're investing in and we're committed to being the go-to resource to the industry in an HVAC&R education and training outside of formal educational institute type training. And that's powered by our 130 years of having the best and brightest in the room generating this enormous amount of content we have.

    The things we're doing, prior to June, our learning platforms were spread out. If you wanted an ALI course, you had to go find it there. If you wanted an e-learning course, you had to go find it there, if you wanted to take an online course or find a topical conference. We've aggregated all that into a platform that now lets someone look at all of our education offerings, an employer, a freelancer, a member, and begin to build this career path education and college post-secondary education career path of how to advance themselves or how to advance an employee and keep track of it. We've gone through that exercise. We've also written the first update to the HVAC Fundamentals textbook this last year and updated that course to be more relevant to the latest practices.

    And finally, through three initiatives, our staff and our editors, Mark Owen and his staff and our publications team are looking at AI tools or artificial intelligence tools and platforms and are in the midst of piloting a couple of small language model type machine learning platforms that could allow a user, an engineer, or a member get better access to our handbooks, our standards, our guidelines, and actually begin creating almost a project file that uses AI to search all this breadth of content and intellectual property we have and put together a list or a process of how to use those on a specific application. Say it's a two-story 20,000 square foot office building in climate zone three, and using that information tailor the references in the ASHRAE content that need to be referenced to design, build, operate, and maintain that building in accordance with ASHRAE recommendations.

    Second, we have started the Multidisciplinary Task Group on Artificial Intelligence. That group's title, scope, and purpose is to look at our technical side of ASHRAE, our technical committees, our standards committees, our handbook chapter authors and figure out how they can best use these tools and not use these tools to generate content. We're right now creating policies on-it still has to be vetted by experts. You can't just plug in and prompt an AI tool and take what it puts out and copy it into our handbook, it's got to be vetted by those subject matter experts. We're trying to work on policies to allow the effective use of AI.

    And that Multidisciplinary Task Group is hard at work. I actually met with them and our board subcommittee on AI, and I'm going to address what it's doing here in just a second, this morning at 7:30 prior to this podcast. I've got some fairly current and relevant data there. The board subcommittee, just as the MTG or the Multidisciplinary Task Group, is looking at our technical side of ASHRAE and how to effectively use it. The board subcommittee is looking at on how best to use it from a member services standpoint and how to allow its use by members, by chapters and provide really good guidance on, again, looking at things where we feel like there's a great use such as these transcription tools and meetings and the research tools that are out there. But again, the very first order of business we left away with is our action item to create a policy on what's acceptable use and what's not acceptable use.

    Again, hanging our hat on ASHRAE's purely 130-year-old technical content and using what is endorsed and approved by ASHRAE and not something that's been mashed up by a tool that's looking at everything on the internet, how to control that and create policies around it. Those are real exciting because technology's changing fast and we just need to get ahead of the curve. And I think between staff, between the board subcommittee and between the Multidisciplinary Task Group, we are trying to move at better than the speed of ASHRAE to make sure we've got all those bases covered and that we're protecting our IP and helping advance the industry at the same time.

    Allison Hambrick:

    Absolutely. The implementation of AI in various industries is both exciting and daunting. All of us, I think, are reckoning with our own relevance in some way in the AI era. But I think it's important that ASHRAE is recognizing that AI is a tool that can help us as opposed to a threat, specifically when it comes to publications and the dissemination of information, things that engineers need to know that they turn to ASHRAE for. Using AI in that way is a wonderful way of adapting to the times. It's a very, very good way to harness its potential. Thank you for elaborating on that.

    Since we've talked a little bit about your initiatives, I know that there are also programs that you began working on prior to becoming society president. Can you tell us more about those?

    Dennis Knight:

    Sure. We decided to continue the Building Decarbonization Challenge and marry that to the Presidential Award of Excellence. We created criteria there that we hoped would trickle down to the chapter level since PAOE and the Decarb Challenge are focused on chapter level activities, so help engage and provide some energy to our chapters in working around decarb case studies that were delivered at local chapters by local members, giving case studies on how certain members are applying our technology to achieve the targets we're setting and how they're communicating with their clients as why they need to do this, and why do they need to design and build buildings that have lower carbon emissions and lower energy use and higher indoor environmental quality? And through the Presidential Award of Excellence, I also was able to then focus on chapters that do that, providing them with a few extra PAOE points to help them gain recognition for the extraordinary efforts they're making to do that. The Decarb Challenge actually provides chapters with anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 grants to work on projects related to it. And I've focused that on projects related to workforce development and growing our industry.

    Next, there are two things that are kind of related. We held an industry summit for a full day before our decarbonization conference that was held in New York City back in October. That summit brought in about 45 industry experts from around the world, and not just North America, but around the world. And there were academics, there were students, there were unions representing the technicians and building operators, there were building owners and manufacturers as well as some policy makers from our Department of Energy. We brought in a paid professional facilitator. We worked with them for a couple of months prior to the summit. We sent out a pre-summit survey, and then we spent the day breaking up into groups and fleshing out what the needs of our industry are from a workforce standpoint for the next five, 10, 15 years.

    And we left that summit with a real time generated by the tools we used in the summit, a real time generated road map that is now being reviewed by the steering committee so that we can publish that road map at the Orlando meeting, make it available to the attendees, but also on that ashrae.org/president page, make it available to every member and every employer on the planet to help them look at and find ways and tools they can use to help attract, retain, and maintain their workforce.

    That's a very similar concept that we've used with what we're calling our industry roundtables. And those have been held at all but one or two of our 16 chapters regional conferences around the world. And just as a summit brought in global leadership, every industry roundtable is looking at local leaders in academia, in education, in manufacturing, in design, and in construction and in operations to have the same kind of conversations. Lizzie Seymour, our director of Member Services, she's gathering all of that input, and by the Phoenix meeting, the summer meeting, we're hoping to roll that into the road map and make it a comprehensive document that our members and our employers and our academics can use to tailor their education requirements, their curriculums, all of that toward the HVAC and our workforce of the future to help them plan those things.

    Tied to that, I've met with several manufacturers that are doing some of the very similar things I talked about in eliminating the need to have a degree to start work in this industry. And they are working with local K through 12 schools, community groups, career and technical colleges, as well as the higher education groups and the communities they serve and where they have employees. And two of the bigger manufacturers have actually hired PhDs in adult education to begin helping them work and provide supplemental material to those career and technology institutes through the guidance counselors at K through 12 schools and their technology programs and to train their new employees in the fundamentals of HVAC and how to best use. And they talk a lot about they use ASHRAE content to create these curriculums. And what I'm hoping to do is work with them and plug them into our professional development group and Publications and Education Committee so we can take advantage of the expertise they've brought in to help improve our products and services in that area.

    Matt Walters:

    We Talked a lot about the wonderful things ASHRAE is doing on this front and how people can get involved in ASHRAE and help. I'd love to just touch briefly on things that individuals can do outside of ASHRAE. For example, I work with a lot of technical colleges in the area, high schools, community college universities. If you have something that you're working on that's interesting, people want to be, I think, inspired. And all of us are on occasion touching some really interesting projects. And people love to hear about these things. If you reach out to local professors or technical college leads and say, "Hey, I'd love to just spend a couple hours and talk to your class, talk to the high schoolers and just talk about the work that you do," you may think it may not be interesting to students, but it can guarantee you that things that fascinate them would surprise you. And getting out there to inspire the next generation of students to come into this industry to create interest and intrigue around it, I think, is a really big step that each one of us can do in our local communities. And whether or not those kids end up coming into your workplace or somebody else's, we're all one team trying to build our society.

    Dennis Knight:

    Yeah, Matt, to add to that, I get the pleasure and the opportunity to talk to a lot of universities and a lot of student branches and student branch advisors as I travel around. And when I go to these meetings, some of the schools like Manipal University in India that I recently went to, the room was full of 400 students, and our chapter there, our student branch is roughly around 100. And believe it or not, 50% of that membership are non-mechanical engineering students. They're from other disciplines: architecture, structural, civil, electrical engineering, IT, computer science. They all are interested in our technology. They're interested in HVAC systems and the benefits they can provide to them and how to develop applications that could help us. And I think that synergy and that power of innovation from having that multidisciplinary group of people in the room and maybe finding an application over in another industry and find out how it might could be applied in HVAC without reinventing the wheel is powerful and it's inspiring.

    And listening to those young people talk about their projects and their thought process and the diverse things they're coming up with are amazing to me. Things that, even after 50 years, I learn something new every day and something I would've never thought about. And that is so inspiring. And then taking that to another university or another student branch advisor and saying, "Hey, look what's happening over here. Maybe you want to talk to these people, take what you're doing, which is amazing, marry it, and go after some common issues and goals and put more heads into the hats to solve this problem and create some new content around it."

    Yeah, it's really inspiring to meet with our students and our student branch advisors and our industry leaders to learn about the things they're thinking about, and then talk to people in other industries and see what they're doing and ask the question, "Well, how could I use this in HVAC&R?" That's a fundamental question we ought to be asking ourselves. That's really good technology. It works great. Would it work in HVAC& R?

    Allison Hambrick:

    Thank you. On a personal note, my mother is a university professor and she's the dean of the School of Business at her university, so education is definitely a topic that is near and dear to me. Students are a vast, oftentimes untapped resource, so I appreciate you taking the time to hear those students out, both within our industry and outside of it, because different perspectives are always valuable, and you never know where the next major application we can use will come from, whether it's business or computer engineering, communications, et cetera. There's always a useful perspective and something to learn from different demographics and different disciplines. So ASHRAE taking the time to both develop within our industry and outside of it is very important.

    All right, Matt, Dennis, any parting thoughts regarding workforce development and/or the current society year?

    Dennis Knight:

    Well, yes. I encourage every member, again, to review the ASHRAE address for this year and the manuscript on the website, maybe look at the presentation. Go to the career conversations, listen to a few of those videos, and then go out and tell your stories, really tell your stories. And I say it in the manuscript; shout it from the rooftops. But if you're at a conference and there's a group of students or a group of parents, talk to them about the industry. Raise our profile. Tell them about the impacts. And like Matt said, you will be overwhelmed and surprised at the people that are willing to listen and the people that had no idea about what we do and the impact we're having and the impact we're capable of having in helping us improve indoor environmental quality and help us solve the issues of the day, whatever they may be that are generated within the built environment and the infrastructure that serves it. Just be energized, be proud of what we do, and go out and tell our stories and help us grow this workforce and raise the profile of our industry in ASHRAE.

    Matt Walters:

    To those listening who are sitting on the edge of do they need me? Should I do something? If there's something that you're dealing with that's really pulling on the strings of your soul and it's beckoning you to bear some sort of responsibility, that's your sense of duty. And the industry needs people like you who are willing to make that impact. And ASHRAE is such a wonderful organization to empower you to do that. If you're thinking, if you're not sure, give it a shot. I guarantee you'll be better off for it, and so will everyone else.

    Allison Hambrick:

    That is extraordinarily well stated.

    Dennis Knight:

    Yes, it is.

    Allison Hambrick:

    Thank you, Matt.

    All right, gentlemen, we are coming up at the end of our time together, so thank you for your insights. I'm sure our listeners will appreciate hearing them. I also would like to add a note that we are all looking forward to connecting with members and attendees at the 2025 ASHRAE Winter Conference in Orlando. Dennis will be there, of course. Representatives of the ASHRAE Journal, myself included, will be there. Matt will also be there. If you see us around, say hi. We're looking forward to connecting.

    Matt Walters:

    Definitely.

    Dennis Knight:

    Yeah. Come tell us your story, right?

    Allison Hambrick:

    Yes, absolutely tell us your story. All right, thank you to our audience for tuning into this episode of ASHRAE Journal Podcast.

    ASHRAE Journal:

    The ASHRAE Journal Podcast team is editor, Drew Champlin; managing editor, Kelly Barraza; producer and assistant editor, Allison Hambrick, assistant editor, Mary Sims; associate editor, Tani Palefski; and technical editor, Rebecca Matyasovski. Copyright ASHRAE. The views expressed in this podcast are those of individuals only, and not of ASHRAE, its sponsors or advertisers. Please refer to ASHRAE.org/podcast for the full disclaimer.

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