AscendDevyn Pizzo
Devyn Pizzo is an electrical design engineer and the founder of Ascend Education Group and Ascension Renewables LLC. Her experience spans 250+ distributed energy projects across nine states, with work across feasibility, electrical design, project engineering and management, procurement, product development, installation, and operations.
Her project experience includes supporting UC Berkeley's Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, alongside ongoing work to make early-stage energy feasibility more accessible, help electrical contractors expand into solar and distributed energy, and support technical upskilling within tribal communities.
Working across the project lifecycle gave Devyn a firsthand view of how decisions made in one discipline create consequences in another. Those experiences became part of the foundation for Ascend and its approach to practitioner-led, systems-focused technical education.
Experience in Practice
From project engineering to workforce development, these examples show how technical work, field experience, and education come together to build stronger, more resilient energy systems.
Blue Oak Ranch Reserve
UC Berkeley
Ascension Renewables
Solar & Distributed Energy
Tribal Communities
Energize Wind River
Technical work doesn’t
happen in silos.
Technical education
shouldn’t either.
Working across design, engineering, procurement, project management, installation, and operations means seeing what happens between disciplines.
A decision that makes sense in design can create a problem during installation. A product decision can affect procurement. A field change can surface later in commissioning or operations.
Those connections are where much of the real work happens—and they're often difficult to learn from isolated technical instruction.
Ascend was built to close that gap.
Our training combines practitioner experience, real project scenarios, and Systems Reasoning to help learners understand not only what they're doing, but how their decisions interact with the larger system around them.
What Success Looks Like
After The Course
Ascend evaluates training around four questions that matter after someone leaves the classroom:
Can they do the work on day one?
Can they apply the skill or make the technical decision in a realistic work setting?
Can they see how their decisions affect the system around them?
Can they recognize how assumptions, inputs, and decisions affect their team, other disciplines, and downstream work?
Can they retain what they learned?
Can they recall and apply the important concepts after the course—not just while they're being taught?
Can they use it when the situation changes?
Can they transfer their reasoning to new projects, unfamiliar conditions, and real-world problems without needing the exact same example?
Want To Go Deeper?
Learn how we build training for real-world performance.
Explore the framework behind how Ascend develops technical training for application, systems understanding, retention, and transfer.
Industry-recognized continuing education.
Approved training designed for credential maintenance, career advancement, and real‑world performance.