Dear Curious Minds,
Thinking about a career in commissioning? As an engineer with decades of experience, allow me to share some thoughts.
Commissioning (Cx) is a discipline built around learning, seeing, asking, testing, translating, and—when it’s done well—serving. It’s technical work, no question, but it’s so much more than that. It gives you a chance to collaborate on solving problems a single discipline can’t solve alone.
Take, for example, building owners. They often come to a project knowing they need something—more space, a renovation, a new facility, better performance—but they may not yet know what they want it to look like when it’s finished, or how they want it to operate once people move in. Working alone, architects tend to ask spatial questions. Engineers lean toward system and constructability questions. Contractors generally boil it down to means and methods.
For owners to get what they want, somebody has to keep asking the question that pulls everything together: “When this is done, what does success look like—and how should the building perform?”
On most projects I’ve seen, the commissioning professional is the one who helps hold that “thread” from beginning to end—and even beyond, into occupancy and operation—so that the project doesn’t become three separate visions: one in the designer’s, one in the contractor’s, and one in the owner’s mind.
The most successful projects engage Cx professionals early in the lifespan of a project. That allows them to pursue a transparent culture across the whole team (e.g., “creating in the open”) so that potential glitches are more obvious early on. After all, if your thinking is off-track and you catch it early, it’s usually a manageable adjustment. If you catch it late in design, it can get ugly. In construction, it gets really ugly. And after a building is built? It can be a genuine disaster—millions of dollars spent on something that doesn’t work.
If you can help create it, a culture of early transparency and consistent accountability becomes a gift, as does the feedback one gets from teammates. Nothing stimulates creativity like an owner saying, “I can’t afford that,” or a contractor saying, “That won’t fit,” or an operator asking, “How are we supposed to maintain this?” If you’re wise, you’ll even learn to self-inflict some pushback by asking, “Is there a simpler way? A clearer way? A more maintainable way? A more loving way?”
Now, that last phrase probably caught you off guard—you might even say it sounds uncomfortably non-technical, but I believe it relates to a mindset found at the center of professional excellence in commissioning (or any other profession, to be honest): You have to love your customer.
Now hear me out: If you love the owner—if you genuinely want them to succeed—you stop treating commissioning like a scorecard where you catch people doing something wrong.
Instead, you’ll learn to start treating it like a mission to help a whole team deliver a building that works.
And when your posture of putting the other first becomes your ethos, you gain something priceless: permission to be vulnerable. It doesn’t bother you to be wrong, because you’re not protecting your ego—you’re protecting the project. You want others to help you find the errors in your thinking. You get to the best answers more quickly, together.
Now, not every team endeavor in business has that ethos at its core, but that mindset is the key to long-term success in business, and life. It has been for me, and it’s made my professional life more fulfilling and, quite frankly, more successful. Given a choice of being remembered as being unreasonable and difficult or highly professional and loving, the latter should win every time.
The collaborative nature of commissioning makes that mindset an attainable goal. If that sounds like the kind of professional you want to become, Cx may be a good road for you.
Keep growing,
Dick Burks, PE, CCP
Paladin, Inc.
Lexington, Kentucky