Invenergy Career Growth & Development

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We take advantage of both internal and external learning opportunities. Externally, we occasionally bring in technical experts to provide targeted training in areas where we want to strengthen our expertise. More often, we leverage industry organizations, professional societies or national labs, which organize conferences, seminars and other training sessions. I encourage each employee to attend at least one or two of these events each year to stay on top of industry advancements. 

Internally, Invenergy offers a robust training platform with a wide range of on-demand content. Managers can assign specific courses, which is especially valuable during a new hire’s first year to help them build both technical and organizational knowledge. At the team level, learning often happens in a more grassroots way. Most weekly meetings include a knowledge share segment, where team members take turns presenting something new they’ve recently learned to their colleagues. This not only champions the learning process but also ensures that valuable insights are shared widely across the team.

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

One of our most impressive projects came from a collaboration between our wind turbine blade reliability team and our data science group. Partnering together, we built a machine learning model that processes images to detect and categorize damage. This represented a major leap from our previous process, improving efficiency, accuracy, and consistency. The project won Invenergy’s Annual Innovation Award and showcased a culture that values knowledge-sharing and cross-functional collaboration.

That same culture drives innovation in enterprise risk and safety. Many meetings begin with a safety topic, giving team members a chance to share newly identified concerns or hazards. At a minimum, these discussions heighten individual awareness, helping prevent accidents. In other cases, they spark entirely new projects. For example, after hearing about a field incident involving tagline ropes, an engineer helped develop a hands-free tagline device. Just months later, we had a working prototype and another win: Invenergy’s Annual Safety for Life Award. Yes, we like to rack up awards in our group!

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

First, create an environment where people can “fail softly.” Innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation comes with the possibility of failure. The key is making those failures quick, safe and instructive so your team learns without losing momentum. 

Be humble and make it clear that no one, including the leader, has all the answers. In the process of lifelong learning, we are all both students and teachers. When team members help you or others learn something new, acknowledge and commend their efforts. Recognition reinforces the behavior you want to see and makes learning a shared value rather than an individual pursuit.