Volaree Rendon’s career in civil engineering started with a crush.
A straight-A high school student in Seattle, Rendon earned enough credits to spend part of her junior and senior years at a local vocational technical college. A love of food was steering her toward culinary arts, but then she developed a crush on the young man who sat next to her in calculus class.
Volaree Rendon In High School.“He said he was taking CAD, Computer Aided Design. I had no idea what that was,” she says. He then asked the shy teenager what she was studying. “I said, without missing a beat- ‘I’m taking CAD too!’” laughs Rendon. “So, I walked into the classroom and I was really intimidated. I looked around, and immediately got imposter syndrome when I saw the technical drawings on the wall, as well as the drafting tables. I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
She approached the instructor to ask to be transferred out of the course.
“I walked up to him and I said, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’” Rendon recalls. “And that moment changed my life. He looked at me and he said, ‘You can do this. Go sit down.’ So I shuffle back to my seat, I sit down, and that was the start of my career.”
The instructor’s faith in Rendon kickstarted a 30-year civil engineering career in the transportation industry—and taught her the importance of mentorship, especially when she could open doors for talented people who hadn’t had a chance to shine. That ethos guided Rendon during her two-decade-long stints at Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, where she is renowned for designing and launching Bentley’s vaunted Premier Scholar Program.
The program is an intense boot camp that accredits superusers in Bentley’s OpenRoads and OpenBridge design software. Premier Scholar aims not only to provide immersive case studies and workshops but to uplift and inspire the best and brightest engineers, designers, and modelers around the world so that they, too, can uplift and inspire others.
The Perfect Fit
From the get-go, Rendon—now Bentley’s director of solutions engineering—has spent much of her career writing courses and training others in Bentley’s civil engineering software.
In the mid-1990s, as lead transportation designer at engineering firm Entranco, Rendon cut her teeth on MicroStation, Bentley’s computer-aided design software for infrastructure design, and InRoads, the predecessor to Bentley’s OpenRoads design software. Soon, she was transferring those skills to others at the Washington state-based firm.
“I would end up teaching a lot of the new engineers how to use InRoads, especially, but both MicroStation and InRoads,” she says. “So I was developing training material and writing courses.”
Rendon continued writing courses when she began working at Cordax Technologies, traveling up and down the West Coast to lead InRoads training for clients that included the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Los Angeles County, and the Oregon Department of Transportation. Then, in 2004, a local Bentley opportunity opened up.
“They were looking for someone in Washington because the Washington State Department of Transportation was moving from CAiCE software to InRoads,” Rendon says. At the time, Bentley didn’t have many people in the state who knew InRoads, had worked with WSDOT, and had experience training and writing course content, she says.
“I thought ‘well, that’s me, I’m the perfect fit!’”
Huge Nerds
Rendon spent the next decade as a senior application engineer at Bentley before detouring to a Seattle-based startup for a couple of years. Then one day, she called her former boss at Bentley.
“I said, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ She says, ‘Great. Do you want to come back?” Rendon recalls. “I love the culture here at Bentley because we inspire each other, we love to geek out, and we have a deep passion for what we do in empowering civilization.”
Now the company’s director of solution engineering, Rendon, leads a team of experts in transportation and civil design. The team tailors engineering solutions to the needs of clients in the transportation industry, acting as “the glue between our users and the product team,” Rendon says.
On The Road
A big part of the job is visiting engineers, designers, and other users of Bentley software, so Rendon and her team are frequently on the road. They work with Bentley users to champion and disseminate best practices, including by organizing roundtables with professionals from state transportation departments. The team also responds to proposal requests that frequently come to Bentley from agencies or organizations looking for products to satisfy a certain engineering need.
“That’s really what we do, if I can boil it down to one sentence. I run a stellar team of civil engineering transportation industry experts with decades of experience. I call us Team Swagger,” Rendon says.
A career highlight for Rendon is building the Premier Scholar Program. Launched in 2021, the program quickly became a sought-after accreditation for Bentley superusers in OpenRoads and OpenBridge design software. Sessions are held throughout the year in different regions of the world, with plans to expand the program to Bentley’s OpenRail in the near future.
Paying it forward
These days, Rendon has less direct involvement in the program after handing it over to her Bentley colleague Scott Urbas. But she makes sure to celebrate the accomplishments of program alumni, seeking them out at conferences and events, and talking to them about what they’re doing. She says she now takes “more of a mentorship role, supporting, and championing the program and celebrating graduates as well as alumni who obtain promotions to senior-level roles in their organization”.
“I’m always thinking about mentorship and how I can help provide opportunities for others who have the drive and determination but just need that foot in the door,” says Rendon.
“There were a lot of people who took an interest in me and became not just mentors but sponsors. They gave me a seat at the table, which changed my life. Like the instructor that told me to go sit back down, or the woman where I worked at Entranco, who took me under her wing and showed me everything,” Rendon adds. “I’m just so grateful for that. So, I want to give back in that way.”
Volaree Rendon working for Krebeco Cable Company.In that spirit, Rendon works with Bentley Education, going to college recruitment fairs, including at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and encouraging young people to get excited about a career in engineering. “There’s a huge talent pool of engineers and scientists and surveyors,” and firms should be tapping into it, she says. For the past few years, Bentley has also been taking part in the National Society of Black Engineers annual convention.
Camping, Catering, and Culinary Delights
Away from engineering, Rendon’s interests lie in fine food and wine: She and her husband, a trained chef, have a side business in catering and are members of the Chaine, a French-origin culinary society with chapters throughout the world.
Rendon is also a travel, nature, and camping enthusiast. One of her heroes is the legendary African-American park ranger at Yosemite National Park, and it’s on Rendon’s bucket list to visit every national park in the U.S. (She’s about a third of the way there.) She also plays acoustic guitar and loves to entertain friends around the campfire.
In 2023, Rendon made the move from Washington state to her husband’s hometown of San Antonio. “We’re thriving. I can wear shorts and flip-flops pretty much every day of the year, so the climate’s quite different here, but I love it.”
Rendon and her spouse take in the fresh air along a grassy trail.(P.S. As for the young man who was Rendon’s youthful crush and helped launch her engineering career: He’s thriving too, Rendon says, running his own company.)
