Groundbreaking solutions, and there was no shortage of ground to cover when ENR’s 2022 National Top 20 Under 40 assembled this year in Tempe, Ariz., for a conference and a conversation on the industry’s top issues. From fostering firm-wide innovation to mentoring the next generation of workers to preparing for the effects of climate change, the Top 20 quickly found that their diverse professional backgrounds brought extra dimensions to these hotly debated topics. But they all agreed that they wanted to focus on how they could get meaningful results forward and make a positive impact in their respective fields today while paving the way for success tomorrow. Chosen by industry judges (see p. 31) from nearly 400 entries, this year’s Top 20 is ENR’s sixth annual class of national winners and the first class to meet in person since the pandemic pushed the meeting online for two years. Happy to be face-to-face and ready to talk about the industry’s challenges, the Top 20 spoke from experience about how the right change, even at a company level, is rarely a straight line.

For example, as much as AEC firms can bid on projects that align with their own environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, project owners play a big role in implementing industrywide initiatives such as diversity, equity and inclusion, green building and sustainability, says Jennifer Anna Pazdon, vice president of the New York City-based Cast Connex Corp. Therefore, industry professionals must do more to engage owners in long-term conversations about such goals. “As much as I like to believe that people are altruistic in all their decision-making, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the design or the construction side is going to make radical change alone,” says Pazdon. “Ultimately we all work for the people with the money—which are the owners.”

At the meeting, held during ENR’s Top Young Professionals conference in Tempe, Ariz., Feb. 23-25, the Top 20 also emphasized looking at the industry’s future through the lens of climate change as they weighed how to implement positive change in a rapidly transforming industry.  

Poseidon says that in her experience, policy change is the best way to ensure sustainable design remains fashionable, as does reducing carbon emissions. “A green skyscraper is kind of oxymoron,” she says. “If things are really going to change, it has to be mandated. It has to be something that comes from government.”  

Although she says the industry has not landed on a single way to measure embodied carbon, she says there are much life cycle assessment tools. “But the data that goes into them in order to determine embodied carbon, if that’s going to be the ultimate output, really needs to be studied carefully.”