The National Transit Institute (NTI) presented its 2017 Training Professional of the Year Award to Diana C. Mendes, Senior Vice President, HNTB Corp.
Diana Mendes has 30 years of diverse experience in the transit industry. During her career, she has held a series of increasingly responsible management and leadership positions in several private consulting firms with a focus on serving public sector transit clients engaged in community planning, growth management, and sustainable transportation infrastructure. As a project manager and a project director on environmental review processes for transit projects she has prepared numerous Categorical Exclusions, Environmental Assessments, and Environmental Impact Statements to advance investment in public transportation. She has developed training courses, delivered guest lectures at universities and written professional reference documents. This “real world” experience allows her to bring a wide range of insights and expertise to the practicing professionals as training professional.
Mendes has been providing training nationwide for the National Transit Institute and the Federal Transit Administration for over 15 years. She has a special appreciation for the adult learning process and uses this to offer unique perspectives and solutions to course participants so that they will retain and bring back to their respective workplaces. She has aided personnel from transit agencies, state DOTs, and metropolitan planning organizations better manage the environmental review process for Federal transit project in over 40 course offerings delivered to more than 1,200 participants.
In addition to traditional class lectures and exercises, Mendes' training sessions energize class participants through the use of role playing so that they can gain new appreciations for what other parties are experiencing and foster better understanding. She also employs a competitive quiz show technique where participants review scenarios in their teams, and then compete to see which team gets the most answers correct. This competitive process engages and energizes participants to focus and remember key technical lessons. Diana has also developed small group exercises to enable groups to work through a problem, and then present their answers to the entire class, which has the added benefit of helping participants learn how to communicate about environmental issues and outcomes succinctly and in plain language. She has helped develop webinars for NTI and FTA and has shown leadership by mentoring and developing other trainers.
Mendes is active in a number of professional associations, including the American Public Transportation Association and the American Planning Association (APA). She regularly speaks at a wide variety of conferences including the Women’s Transportation Seminar, TRB, Rail~Volution, APA, COMTO, and APTA and has delivered over 40 presentations to share results of her project work and research.
For her commitment to her industry and training other professionals with in it, Diana Mendes is NTI’s Training Professional of the Year.
The Training Professional of the Year award recognizes the exceptional contribution and sustained impact of a transit training professional on his or her organization and the industry as a whole. The Training Professional of the Year is chosen based on an applicant’s innovation, impact, professional development, and a number of reference letters.
The National Transit Institute was created by Congress and receives funding from the Federal Transit Administration to develop, promote, and deliver training and education programs for the public transit industry. NTI’s mission is to provide training and educational resources in support of public transportation and quality of life in the United States.
