2026 Education Courses

Please select two (2) topics you believe should be prioritized for educational courses this year.

Small mistakes in an estimate can have a huge impact on your bid's bottom line, and this course provides the tools needed to be both comprehensive and competitive. This course will discuss the process for assembling an estimate, including: developing material lists, applying labor unit data, material takeoff, and application of direct job costs, overhead, and profit.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

• List types of mistakes found when estimating electrical construction projects and how to avoid them

• Describe the parts of an estimate

• Explain the importance of establishing the true cost for a project

• Develop an estimate to provide job management information

• Discuss how labor units can be used to competitively bid projects

• Explain the difference between a competitive bid and a low bid

Developed to discuss all phases of the estimating process, this course covers all phases of preparing a competitive bid. Key topics include identifying desirable bid opportunities, analyzing the company's capabilities to ensure profitable results, the estimator's role at various stages of the project, writing an effective scope letter, and identifying often hidden costs in the bid documents.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

• Discuss the steps necessary to prepare a competitive bid

• Identify the most desirable bid opportunities

• Describe how a company's capabilities can be analyzed to ensure profits

• Discuss cash flow and bonding

• Discuss relevant contract terms

• Identify price adjustment techniques, overhead, and profit

• List the documents required to estimate a construction project

Target audience: Individuals with a firm grasp of basic estimating principles and experience preparing bids.

Most electrical contractors agree that one of the industry's most vexing problems is the change order. They may significantly alter the nature of the work, change the materials to be installed, or be considered "insignificant" changes, but they often alter the sequence of scheduled activities, require rework of installations, and divert some manpower and equipment needed for the original contract work.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify change order errors in advance to minimize project loss

• Describe the impact of change management on project success

• Discuss how to minimize the impact of change orders

• Explain how to manage changes on a project

Lean Construction is a shift in thought process towards collaborative project efficiency and quality. This shift promotes delivery of projects to clients by maximizing value and minimizing waste, while pursuing perfection. The purpose of this course is to teach electrical contracting project managers and superintendents how to improve productivity through a focus on lean construction principles. Participants will learn strategies to reduce workflow variability and increase throughput in order to decrease waste and increase efficiency.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

• Develop a thought process to improve productivity based on lean construction principles

• Identify ways to encourage input and collaboration from all project team members

• Integrate methodologies that will allow a company to get to the root cause of a problem and use problem-solving statistical tools to solve it quickly

• Explain business needs such as product development, operations, technology, and customer relations

Learn 10 Business Practices that you can implement now to help achieve your goals. Topics discussed will include: selecting advisors, internal controls, business plans, benchmarking, succession planning, as well as others.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

•      Understand why selecting the best business advisors is important

•      Understand internal controls and how to manage them

•      Discuss key financial information and how it can be used to make decisions

•      Explain factors to consider in succession planning

Target audience: business owners and executive-level management

If you don't know where you are going, you will never get there! Learn the importance of the budgeting process and how to get started. This course will walk you through the steps in preparing a budget, including capital and cash budgets. How to use the budget to manage operations will also be discussed, as well as preparing an annual business plan.

Following this course, participants will be able to:

•      Identify the elements to include in an annual business plan

•      Describe the steps in the budgeting process and understand how to build assumptions

• Explain how to create capital and cash budget

• Understand the benefits of budgeting

Project financials are a weakness in many organizations, yet our success with our banking and bonding partners relies heavily on this data. Many are left uncertain when it comes to knowing the outcome of projects while they are occurring, and experience significant fade or gain at the end of the job that was not predicted. Financial acumen can be the line in the sand between staff being "project managers" versus "project witnesses." The solution to this is defined standard practices to set your team up to win. In this session, we will discuss the importance of managing cash flow and how to produce accurate project forecasts.

Learning objectives:

•      Outline best practices for producing stellar schedule of values

•      Discuss billing and collections standards to focus on getting the cash in the door timely

•      List the steps required to produce an accurate project forecast

•      Show the tremendous effect labor productivity tracking has on the quality of project financial projections