How ChenMoore Built a Learning Culture From The Ground Up With Thirst
With Adeline Chappuis, Learning Specialist at ChenMoore
80%
Platform
Adoption
175
Employees on Platform
1
Central
Knowledge Hub
When you’re running a multi-disciplinary engineering firm across 15+ offices, the challenge isn’t just delivering great projects.
It’s making sure every person — across every discipline, every location, every role — has the knowledge, tools, and confidence to keep growing.
For ChenMoore, a Florida-based engineering firm with nearly four decades of history, that challenge came into sharp focus when leadership made a decision that many growing firms eventually face: it was time to invest seriously in learning and development.
Not tweak it. Build it. From scratch.
“When I joined, there wasn’t really a learning structure in place,” says Adeline Chappuis, Learning Specialist at ChenMoore. “The goal was to build something that could grow with the business — a real home for knowledge that everybody could find, use, and add to.”
ChenMoore had the talent, the ambition, and the culture to make it work.
What they needed was the right platform.
That’s where Thirst came in.
Starting from scratch is both an opportunity and a pressure.
For ChenMoore, it meant building an L&D function inside a billable-hours engineering firm — where every ask you make of an employee takes them away from client work. That means learning has to earn its place. Every time.
But before Thirst, “worth it” was hard to demonstrate — because learning had nowhere to live.
Training recordings might end up in SharePoint. Lunch and learn notes might be in someone’s inbox. Conference takeaways? Gone. Knowledge that walked in through the door of every project and every event just… vanished.
It created three core challenges:
“Ambiguity is always uncomfortable,” says Adeline. “No matter how much we might experience it, working through unknowns is frustrating. A lot of what I started doing was simply figuring out what the processes even were — getting them written down so there was finally something to build on.”
For ChenMoore, this wasn’t just an L&D problem. It was a knowledge problem, a retention problem, and a culture problem — all at once.
“People now have a map. To go from A to B, this is what I need to learn to get to the next stage in my career. That’s such a game changer.”
Learning Specialist, ChenMoore
Built For This From Day One
Thirst wasn’t something Adeline had to go hunting for. It was part of the vision before she even walked through the door.
“The goal was to implement a learning experience platform,” she explains. “A real knowledge hub where all the great knowledge our employees have gets out of their heads and onto the platform.”
But the moment she actually got into Thirst, something clicked.
“I fell in love with it from the very first conversation,” she says. “Most learning tools are one-way — you watch, you tick a box, you move on. Thirst is different. Every employee gets ownership. They’re not just learners, they’re contributors — and when people share what they know, everyone gets better.”
That mindset shaped everything about how ChenMoore launched Thirst. Rather than a big, top-down rollout, Adeline took a deliberate, soft-launch approach — building habits first, getting people through the door before asking them to fill it.
Within weeks, ChenMoore had:
Centralised all learning events on the platform – from company-wide sessions to quick-turnaround lunch and learns organised by individual offices.
Launched a 20-course project management learning journey – giving employees a clear, structured path through content they could actually apply.
Started building documented career paths – so people could finally see exactly what they needed to learn to move from where they were to where they wanted to be.
Empowered employees to post their own events and share their own knowledge – turning the platform from a one-way broadcast into a living, breathing knowledge hub.
The events feature became an unexpected gateway to the whole platform.
“We’re slowly shifting from sending event invites through Outlook to sending them through Thirst,” Adeline explains. “It’s still the same Teams call — but it gets people logging in, gets them seeing the platform, gets them used to it. That way, when we ask them to do more, they already know where to go.”
The small details won her over, too. Being able to embed the Teams link and location directly into each event listing — so attendees had everything in one place — made a real impression. “Chef’s kiss,” she says.
And whenever the team needed something beyond the platform itself, Thirst was right there — whether that was a quick email to their account manager or a regular quarterly call to talk through what was working and what could be better.
“If there’s not a capability we need quite yet, the Thirst team really pay great attention to us and our needs,” she says. “No matter what platform you choose, if the responsiveness isn’t there, it’s just a miss. That openness to building what we ask for has been a real value add.”
“We’ve gone from a culture of ‘this is just kind of how things are’ to ‘we can always improve.’ That’s a real culture of lifelong learning.”
Learning Specialist, ChenMoore
Early Wins — and a Culture Starting to Shift
It didn’t take long for the early signs to show.
Just six weeks after going live, ChenMoore had already hit an 80% login rate — with 140 out of 175 employees on the platform.
“It’s hard to get people used to and actually using new systems,” says Adeline. “Getting to 80%? That’s a win.”
Thirst was already transforming how learning worked at ChenMoore with:
And the superstar users? They showed up fast.
Just six weeks in, people had already emerged unprompted. One had completed the entire 20-course learning journey. Another was emailing Adeline before every event, asking: “How do we get this on Thirst?”
“I kind of handed it over to her and said: you can post this yourself,” says Adeline. “That’s exactly what I want — people taking ownership of the platform, not waiting for the L&D team to do it for them.”
The broader feedback told the same story. Across the organisation, the response wasn’t resistance — it was relief.
“A lot of the feedback I’m hearing is: ‘Oh, thank goodness we have this now.”
From Blank Canvas to Learning Culture
For ChenMoore, Thirst is just getting started. It’s become the home of learning — and the ambition for what it holds keeps growing.
Onboarding? Being rebuilt entirely on Thirst — giving every new starter a clear, guided experience from day one.
Career development? Learning journeys will map directly to ChenMoore’s new documented career paths — so employees can see exactly what to do to move up.
Knowledge sharing? The goal is for everyone who attends a conference on the company’s time to share what they learned — so the whole firm benefits, not just the person in the room.
Compliance and events? Both are on the roadmap — and with the platform already becoming ChenMoore’s central company calendar, the pieces are falling into place.
What started as a blank canvas has turned into the foundation for a genuine learning culture — one that Adeline plans to keep building, one goal at a time.
“We’ve gone from a culture of ‘this is just kind of how things are’ to ‘we can always improve.’ That’s fostering a real culture of lifelong learning — and a year from now, that habit will be second nature.”
And if another company asked whether they should try Thirst?
“Do it,” she says. “It’s that great combination of not just consuming content, but being a contributor. It empowers each employee to take ownership of not just their own learning, but their entire team. And that builds rapport, community, and better outcomes.”
Her one piece of advice for L&D teams going through something similar: “Be patient with the culture change. Focus on one goal. Then make another goal.”
Because at ChenMoore, that’s exactly how a blank slate became a thriving learning culture.
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