Training + Education

RATIO is committed to developing and advancing our knowledge and expertise relating to sustainability, building performance, and occupant health and wellness.

Knowledge Sharing

RATIO promotes internal knowledge sharing via our intranet platform, Upshift. This is a platform to share anything from new technologies, lessons from the field, design inspiration, and more. Upshift is also a resource for RATIO policies, standards, project information, and best practices. This platform continues to grow and evolve.

We aim to provide staff with the most up-to-date, relevant and interesting information regarding sustainable practices. We aim to incorporate performance and wellness metrics into project dashboards on Upshift. A project dashboard will give anyone in the firm the ability to view a snapshot of any project at any time. Metrics such as EUI will allow teams to more easily understand, benchmark and incorporate performance and wellness strategies into our design process.

RATIO hosts biannual firm-wide meetings providing status update on business, operations, performance and other relevant topics. A goal is to incorporate a project performance update from a sustainability perspective at each meeting.

Professional Development

All employees are provided and encouraged to use a yearly professional development allowance to attend workshops, seminars and conferences. RATIO’s Director of Sustainability tracks annual conferences like Greenbuild and ensures participation. The SRG team aims to coordinate quarterly firm-wide education seminars focusing on current project work, research and best practices. They also aim to provide training sessions for energy tracking, conceptual energy modeling, daylighting and other software, resources and explorations. Lastly, members of SRG in each office aim to coordinate lunch-and-learn sessions that provide continuing education credits for professional accreditations and/or introducing new products or materials that contribute to our sustainability goals. We are developing a policy for all vendors to share how their product contributes to environmental impacts.

Accreditation

Rating systems such as LEED, WELL Building Standard, Sustainable SITES and others are established frameworks for which our clients can benchmark their spaces. Understanding of these frameworks is important to deliver the best product to our clients.

While we may have select experts with a deeper knowledge base of these frameworks, a collaborative team approach produces the most holistic and comprehensive results. With that in mind, RATIO strongly encourages design staff to become (LEED or otherwise) accredited professionals and to maintain their credentials. We provide resources to assist in preparation for accreditation exams as well as credential maintenance through our physical and digital libraries, approved lunch-and-learn sessions and online subscriptions.

Research

In early 2018 RATIO created a research and development group to more formally explore different ways of thinking and test ideas. RATIO’s Director of Sustainability as well as several key members from SRG are involved with a number of different research projects.

This group is currently providing us the avenue to explore a pre- and post-occupancy evaluation process. Each year staff will be able to apply for a new research project. The idea is that we learn and grow, test and re-test, outside of typical project constraints.