Leon Plett

Leon values creativity, collaboration, and improvement through incremental change. He is a highly regarded structural engineer in Victoria, delivering creative, economical structural design solutions and exemplary client service on many of the city’s most important buildings.

Leon joined RJC after graduating from Lakehead University with a Bachelor of Engineering. He continually pushes the boundaries of structural engineering, and his supportive approach to creative architects has resulted in numerous design awards. Leon has special expertise with seismic upgrading of heritage buildings and with mid-rise and heavy timber wood-frame buildings. His work is evident in projects such as the Hudson Bay Redevelopment and Brentwood College Visual Arts Centre, a project that incorporates heavy timber and structural glass.

P.Eng., MIStructE, Struct.Eng., LEED AP

I grew up in southern Manitoba on a turkey farm. Both of my parents didn’t finish high school and I’m the first person in my family to finish post-secondary school.

In grade 7 when I took the standardized aptitude tests, the number one thing that came out was engineer. I had to go look up what an engineer did, and it really resonated with me, as I’ve always been a spatial thinker and mathematically inclined. I had a bit of a roundabout entry into post-secondary school. I started a business when I was in grade 12, and ran that for a few years, took a job in the trades, and then as I was working in the trades, I applied to a community college in Winnipeg. I went to Red River College initially for a two-year drafting program and then I extended it to a three year civil technologist program. Following that, on both my success in college and my love of engineering work, I continued on to Lakehead University in Ontario and obtained my bachelor of engineering.  

During that whole time, I got married and had kids. My first child was born in my first year of college, my second during my third year of college, so I moved with my wife and two young kids to Thunder Bay to finish my schooling. It was a hectic couple of years for our family.

When I graduated, I knew I wanted to work for RJC, with their national presence and the employee ownership structure. I applied to the Calgary office, thinking that it’s the closest office to my family in Manitoba, and they ended up coming back and saying we don’t have a position available in Calgary, would I consider moving to Victoria? And we ended up saying yes to that. It was a surprisingly harder decision than you might think. But it was the right decision for us. We moved to Victoria in 2005 and I have been in the RJC Victoria office ever since.

When I started at RJC, I met Bruce Johnson who was the managing principal at the Victoria office. We were a much smaller office at the time, and I was fortunate to work very closely with Bruce in the first decade of my career. And then, as we grew the office, and he approached retirement, he took on the role of managing director for the firm across Canada, and I moved into the managing principal role for Victoria. He’s been my career mentor from day one in structural engineering, and are still in touch.

In addition to my mentorship with Bruce, co-op programs are really important to me. When I went to school I was involved in co-op programs through college and university. I feel like I learned just as much during those co-ops as I did during my classes in school. We are very committed in Victoria to hiring co-op students on the structural and building science teams. We’ve stayed in touch with a number of those students, and many students have come back to work for us full-time. It’s been a really great connection to both Camosun College and UVic in terms of getting to know the students and faculty there.

Both the scholarship and the mentorship pieces excite me about this initiative. We don’t see enough diversity in engineering in Canada. Anything we can do to encourage diversity in the industry is a great thing. For me personally, the connection to Canadian Indigenous people goes back a long way because I spent most of my teenage summers volunteering as a camp counselor in northern Ontario. I spent two weeks of every summer working with Indigenous kids aged 6-10 from a nearby reserve, it was an amazing experience. I learned a lot from them and hopefully they learned from me too. That experience has stuck with me, as it was a surprise for me as a teenager to see the living conditions of kids we picked up for camp.  

I went to engineering school before I ever met or knew a single engineer. I was second year of Red River before I ever met a real practicing engineer. Its’ one of those easily definable careers where you learn about in junior high, oh that’s something I could do, I’m good at math, and I like buildings and Legos. And you don’t necessarily know what it’s really about. We find that a lot of people come to our office for their  first co-op program and they really don’t know what they will be doing. They come to our office and think they will be getting coffee and doing menial tasks for people, and on day three when they are designing building components they are really taken by surprise. That’s a really fun process to be a part of.