Testimonials

Thank you for the wonderful job you did teaching us earlier this week in the ORD training. Normally, I’d stop there, but in this case, I don’t think a simple ‘thanks’ does you justice. I think it’s only fair to recognize your efforts with equally thorough praise for the great job you did. You have an incredibly deep understanding of civil engineering, but your expertise with Bentley products is absolutely unmatched. On top of that, your vast experience USING ORD and other CADD software is invaluable. These skills and experience in themselves are beyond impressive, but your ability to transfer knowledge to a class of engineers, CADD techs, and managers - albeit online - blows my mind. ORD is a powerful program, but without proper training and experience, its powers go unwielded and, in fact, can create problems. The complexities and nuances of civil engineering on its own make your job an uphill battle. But pair that with a sophisticated program that implements these principles in a usable, effective, and efficient manner, all while balancing how much flexibility to give to the end users (of vastly differing experience levels), makes your job, darn near impossible. You are 1 in a million. I’d like to point out, specifically, what I appreciated about you and your class: You taught us what the program allows us to do. This, by itself would have met my expectations for a training class and is still not an easy feat. Explaining to users of all different backgrounds and experience levels all the nuances of each step, process, command, dialog, etc. is an unbelievable difficult thing to do. And even more difficult to do it efficiently. You did this masterfully. Your ability to spot when someone was having an issue (whether technically or conceptually), address it, and keep the class moving was incredible. At the same time, you were able to address very advanced and technical questions (both engineering and software related), without a sweat (and numerous times). Your communication skills are excellent. You mentioned that you could talk about civil engineering all day, that really showed and you make it look easy. You have an uncanny ability to “see where someone is going with something”. You immediately recognized what a question was asking from a technical standpoint and addressed it to the questioner at their level of experience. Beyond that, though, then you took it 1 step further and really parsed (to the class) what the person was asking and why they were asking it. Whether it was because “well, this is how it used to be done and this is why it needed to be changed” or “this is stored in memory”, you took the opportunity to turn the question into a lesson for the entire class about “why this is this way” or “why doing this that way might create problems down the road” or even “why this feature is so awesome.” Perhaps, most importantly, you did a great job showing us how to use the power of ORD to do things VERY quickly, while explaining how to implement this in practice so that when the time comes to edit, detail, and change our designs, we can leverage the power of ORD to use everything we have created to deliver a complete and accurate (and really aesthetically pleasing) design. I want to underline how much I appreciated this part of your class. Like you said, ORD is an incredible program. But in my experience, the power comes in being able to trust, use, and leverage the data that we create. You teach how and why to do things in a way that will maximize the power of ORD, not just create a class full of students that “know enough to be dangerous”. Finally, your passion for both civil engineering and ORD make the class enjoyable and exciting. I felt your excitement when you showed us new features, check boxes, and commands that fix annoyances or issues that come with all civil engineering software. You would explain why “this” was so difficult to implement, or how creative the person that figured “that” out was, or why “this” could ‘change the world’ from a civil perspective. I really enjoyed that part of your teaching and I found myself excited to use ORD and all of its capabilities. You have been down every rabbit hole and the extra time and effort you spend to figure out what is going on and explain it to everyone is SO appreciated to all of us that may avoid having to go down any one of them.