Onboarding Program — New Project Engineers and Field Engineers

A 12-week internal training program

This is not a university course. It is designed for a construction company running a cohort of new hires — CM graduates, engineering graduates, career changers, and craft professionals moving into the office — through their first three months.

Format. One 90-minute session per week, reading done in advance. Participants are working on live projects the whole time.

The critical difference from the academic syllabi: participants do not use the Willow Street Community Center. They use their own live project. Every deliverable is a real artifact for a real job, reviewed by their project manager. That is what makes this program worth the salary time.

Facilitator. A senior project manager or project executive, not a trainer. The sessions are discussions and working sessions, not lectures — the reading carries the content.

What this program is trying to fix

New project engineers spend their first year learning by absorption, badly and out of order. They are handed a submittal log without being told what it is for, a cost report they cannot read, and a set of drawings they can navigate but not interrogate. Most of them figure it out. It costs the company a year and costs them a great deal of feeling stupid.

Twelve weeks and eighteen hours of structured time compresses a meaningful fraction of that.

Learning outcomes

A participant who completes this program can:

1. Explain their project's delivery method and contract type, and name the three risks the company owns because of them.
2. Find any provision in their contract in under ten minutes, and state the notice requirements from memory.
3. Navigate a drawing set and a project manual, and find conflicts between them systematically.
4. Build and run a submittal log back-scheduled from required-on-site dates.
5. Write an RFI that gets a usable answer in one round.
6. Write a daily report with an impact statement that would survive a claim.
7. Read their project's cost report and explain what the cost-to-complete forecast is asserting.
8. Read their project's schedule, find the critical path, and identify what is eroding float.
9. Price a change order completely, including time and impact.
10. Explain why a schedule decision is a safety decision.

Weekly schedule

Week 1 — What we do and how we make money

Read: Chapters 1 and 2 Session: The lifecycle and the cast. Then the part that surprises everyone: this is a finance business that happens to build things. Walk the company's own margin structure honestly — what a point of margin is worth, what a day of delay costs on their project. Deliverable: For your live project — the stakeholder map, the delivery method, and the daily cost of a schedule slip, computed. Facilitator note: Show real numbers. Redact what you must, but show them. The single most common complaint from young engineers is that nobody ever showed them how the money worked.

Week 2 — Your contract

Read: Chapters 3 and 4; skim Appendix G Session: Delivery methods and pricing structures as risk allocation. Then everyone opens their own project's contract and finds five specific things: order of precedence, notice period, LD amount, retention terms, and the changes clause. Deliverable: A one-page contract summary for your project, with the notice deadlines on a calendar.

Week 3 — Reading the documents

Read: Chapter 7 Session: Drawing set navigation, CSI, and — the part nobody reads — Division 01. Working session: everyone brings their own set and hunts for discrepancies in a specific assembly. Deliverable: Ten discrepancies from your own project's documents, logged with a proposed resolution and a dollar consequence. Facilitator note: This session reliably produces at least one finding worth real money. Make sure those get escalated to the project team — it demonstrates the program's value immediately.

Week 4 — Estimating enough to be useful

Read: Chapter 12; skim Chapter 13 Session: The unit-cost formula, the burdened labor rate, and markup versus margin. Participants who will never estimate still need this, because it is the arithmetic behind the cost report and every change order they will price. Deliverable: Build one unit cost from first principles for a self-perform activity on your project, and compare it to what the estimate carried.

Week 5 — The schedule

Read: Chapter 14; work Appendix B problems 1–6 Session: Forward pass, backward pass, float, critical path — by hand, on paper, in the room. Then open the project's actual schedule and find the critical path. Deliverable: A one-page written analysis of your project's current critical path and the two near-critical paths behind it. Facilitator note: Budget the whole 90 minutes and expect to run over. This is the session that separates people who can talk about schedules from people who can read one.

Week 6 — Buyout and scope gaps

Read: Chapter 16 Session: Scope sheets and the hunt for the seams between subcontracts. Working session: take three adjacent trades on a live project and find the gaps. Deliverable: A scope sheet for one trade on your project, and three scope gaps you found between adjacent subcontracts.

Week 7 — Submittals, RFIs, and document control

Read: Chapter 25 Session: The highest-leverage administrative skill in the industry. Rebuild a submittal log by back-scheduling from required-on-site dates instead of specification order. Then write RFIs and read them aloud for critique. Deliverable: Your project's submittal log re-sorted by required-on-site date, with the three items that are already late flagged; plus two RFIs you wrote. Facilitator note: This week has the highest immediate return of any session in the program. It routinely surfaces a real late submittal on somebody's job.

Week 8 — The record

Read: Chapter 26 Session: Meetings that produce commitments with names and dates. Then the daily report, and specifically the impact statement — the field that decides claims and is almost always blank. Show a vague entry and an evidentiary one side by side. Cover the confirming letter for a verbal directive. Deliverable: Five daily reports from your project, rewritten to the standard, including at least one real impact statement.

Week 9 — Cost control

Read: Chapter 28 Session: The five columns, accruals, and cost-to-complete versus cost-to-date. Then open the project's actual cost report and read it for the red-flag patterns. Deliverable: A written review of your project's current cost report naming the three cost codes you would investigate and why. Facilitator note: Have project managers brief their engineers beforehand on what is confidential. Then let the engineers actually see the report — an engineer who has never seen the cost report cannot help you control it.

Week 10 — Changes

Read: Chapter 31 Session: The threshold concept: the cost of a change is rarely the cost of the work. Price a real change from a live project all the way through — direct cost, credits, markups, time extension with extended general conditions, and impact. Run the change-order negotiation as a role-play (see field-simulation-guide.md). Deliverable: One fully priced change order from your project, with the impact component substantiated.

Week 11 — Safety as a system

Read: Chapter 24 Session: The most important session in the program. The threshold concept — safety is a property of the production system, not a rulebook — and the scaffold near-miss's third finding. Then: take a real acceleration or compression decision from one of the participants' projects and run a safety impact review on it. Deliverable: A JHA you wrote for a real upcoming activity, developed with the crew that will do the work. Facilitator note: Have the company's safety director co-facilitate. And be prepared for the uncomfortable part: this session invites participants to critique real schedule decisions their own company made. Let them. If you cannot, do not run this session at all.

Week 12 — Closeout, the career, and what's next

Read: Chapters 40 and 42 Session: Closeout as a planned phase with its own critical path. Then the career conversation — the two ladders, what actually gets people promoted here, what the company's progression looks like, and what each participant should be working on for the next twelve months. Deliverable: Your own five-year map, and a closeout schedule for your current project built backward from substantial completion.

After the twelve weeks

The program covers 15 of 42 chapters. Give every participant the whole book and point them at:

• Chapters 5, 32, 33, 34 — law, payment, claims, and company finance. Assign these in the second six months; they land much better once someone has watched a payment cycle and a dispute.
• Chapters 8, 9, 10 — means and methods, for participants without a field background.
• Chapters 18–23 — the field operations chapters, for anyone heading toward a superintendent role.
• Chapter 41 — leading people, at the point they first supervise someone.

Making this program actually work

Three things determine whether it produces value or becomes a checkbox:

1. The deliverables must be real and must be reviewed by the participant's project manager. A submittal log rebuilt for a live job and then ignored teaches cynicism. Get PM buy-in before the cohort starts, and make the review a line in the PM's own expectations.
2. A senior person must facilitate. The content is in the book. What participants cannot get from the book is a project executive saying "here is how that actually went on our job, and here is what it cost us."
3. Protect the time. Ninety minutes a week for twelve weeks is eighteen hours against a first-year salary. Every cohort will face a week where a project emergency takes precedence. Move the session; do not cancel it. A program that gets cancelled twice is over.

A note on mixed cohorts

The best cohorts mix CM graduates with craft professionals moving into the office. The graduates know the vocabulary and cannot picture the work; the craft professionals can picture everything and have never seen a cost report. Structuring the working sessions so those two groups have to explain things to each other is the highest-value thing a facilitator can do, and it is worth deliberately seating them together.