Knowledge Development

Continuous knowledge development for all employees is a spearhead policy at VenhoevenCS: it is important for maintaining your professional expertise, your vitality and personal development, your career potential and your sustainable employability. We have grouped all our knowledge development in the VenhoevenCS Academy program.

The VenhoevenCS Academy consists of training courses, research projects and research groups, excursions, lectures, workshops, conferences, fairs, professional traineeships and internships.

The  VenhoevenCS Academy has 3 objectives:

Vocational Training

Maintaining and developing professional expertise is vital to the individual careers of our employees but also to VenhoevenCS as a whole. Obviously this includes software skills and knowledge about legislation and regulations. But further ‘up’ a career, it also involves skills regarding presentations, negotiations, contracting, and so forth.

Research & Development

The VenhoevenCS Academy is directly connected to our projects and research activities. There are four R&D Groups:

1. Sustainable Buildings
2. Design Tools
3. Building Techniques
4. Materials & Interiors

All employees can take part in one or two of these groups. The groups function bottom-up and top-down and advice the project teams and the management. They play a key role in identifying knowledge gaps, collect, development and share expertise. In-house experts are also part of the R&D groups, such as BREEAM-NL expert in Sustainable Buildings; BIM expert in Building Techniques; wood expert in Materials & Interiors; and parametric design in Design Tools.

Developing Personal Skills

The organizational structure of VenhoevenCS is quite informal and non-hierarchal. Project teams are relatively small and every team member is expected to contribute actively to create the best result in terms of design concept, aesthetics, sustainability, technical detailing, and so forth.

This means VenhoevenCS values specific personal skill sets, such as initiative, team work and communication. VenhoevenCS invests yearly in developing these skills among teams and individual employees.

Learning Dutch

All non-Dutch speaking employees can take Dutch lessons paid for by VenhoevenCS. Although we speak English in the office, it is important to learn Dutch in order to interact with Dutch clients and various experts.

Bildung

Our work at VenhoevenCS is very broad and with a forward thinking approach. It is also very much embedded into society. Therefore VenhoevenCS also attaches a great importance to Bildung, e.g. keeping track of other disciplines (such as philosophy or the visual and performing arts) and keeping up with general trends such as the influence of technological advancement, current affairs and changes in society and culture.

Knowing the context within which we work helps seeing the bigger picture of our design practices. Bildung also stimulates critical and creative thinking, which VenhoevenCS considers one of the most important skills of the 21^st century: critical and creative thinking helps us to make informed decisions through thoughtful analysis.