One Year of APEX

The first-of-its-kind initiative closes knowledge gaps in Texas’s asphalt industry

By Cathleen Draper

One year ago, a joint initiative between TxDOT and TXAPA came to fruition: the Asphalt Pavement EXchange.

Referred to as APEX, the program serves as a central hub for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and education across the Texas asphalt industry. It’s got one objective in mind.

“The ultimate goal of this whole program is to build long-lasting, more durable asphalt pavements,” said Jim Warren, APEX director.

To do that, APEX equips asphalt pavement professionals across the state with knowledge through educational materials, in-person and virtual workshops and events, an online resource library, and regular communications. It’s the first program of its kind in the nation—but it certainly won’t be the last.

APEX was created to address a gap in the asphalt industry. With 13,000 employees, TxDOT faces several unique challenges. First, a mid-level knowledge gap as retirement-age workers leave the force and younger generations enter the field, according to Warren. Second, the state of Texas itself, specifically its size and range of climates and geographies.

“We have a very different type of soil in Austin, for example, than they do in Lubbock, and that affects how you lay asphalt pavement,” noted Keaton Hernandez, APEX’s adult learning director. “We’re not a state where the weather, the climate, the soil, anything is consistent.”

Processes, materials, and more vary across the state and its districts. Through knowledge sharing, APEX aims to increase consistency and quality, whether you’re laying pavement in Amarillo or Laredo.

And third, TxDOT’s inherently siloed structure. Design, materials, construction, and maintenance—they might not interact with one another per se, but their roles are intimately related.

Take a construction crew. They could place the asphalt perfectly, but it could be the wrong type. “They might say, ‘that’s not my problem,’” Warren said. “It is everybody’s problem, because now we’ve done a really good job of placing the asphalt, but it’s the wrong mix for the area, or it’s not thick enough, or any number of different things.”

APEX’s educational offerings address those silos, he continued, “all the way around materials design, construction, and maintenance—from the boots on the ground up to the CEOs and the district engineers.”

Learning how to share across roles and cultures is “phenomenally complicated,” Warren said. But, he continued, “it’s worth the effort.”

Building the Foundation

Last summer, when APEX launched, the program had to start building its infrastructure from the ground up from an office for Warren, Hernandez, and the APEX team, to photocopiers and desks, to the processes and foundations of what APEX would become.

In a collaborative effort, committees and Working Groups were formed to establish exactly what APEX hopes to achieve, how it will do so, and the processes in between. Today, some 180 experts from across the industry work together, developing materials and resources for asphalt professionals across the state.

“It’s a Texas-sized program,” Warren said.

The Asphalt Pavement Quality Initiative (APQI) Steering Committee, comprised of TxDOT and industry leaders, assigns ideas and concepts to the various Task Forces and Working Groups to pursue. Hernandez works hand in hand with those nine groups, each of which owns a specific asphalt topic, from materials and mix selection to construction and inspection.

She supports them, helping the groups to stay organized and prioritize educational needs. Then she provides a framework for developing knowledge-sharing materials. The framework, called MAP, asks three key questions: What is the message? Who is the audience? What educational product aligns with that audience and message?

“We are developing educational materials for those out in the field up through professional engineers with Ph.Ds.,” Hernandez said. “All of those different audiences have different needs in terms of learning and materials.

Those materials include infographics, posters, how-to guides, and technical documents. Collaborating with the Working Groups to develop the products has been a huge accomplishment for APEX, she continued.

Once a product is complete, it is shared with the APEX community and sent to the District Asphalt Pavement Specialists, designated APEX representatives in TxDOT’s 25 districts. They serve as the conduit between design, materials, construction, and maintenance groups and distribute APEX’s resources among them.

APEX’s educational offerings—roughly 200 products—also live on the program’s new website, which went live in May on APEXTX.org. Its launch is one of APEX’s crowning achievements in its first year, connecting asphalt professionals not only with resources and materials, but also to TxDOT, research centers such as Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute, and organizations like TXAPA.

Professionals can also find episodes of Everyday Asphalt, a monthly podcast hosted by Warren that covers a range of topics that matter most to those in the field.

There is no shortage of accomplishments in the initiative’s first year, but the Essentials Workshops in particular stand out. These two-day, in-person summits cover the lifecycle of asphalt pavement—the foundations of materials, mix design, how to plan and design, construction, maintenance, and beyond—and the best practices within those areas.

Essentials Workshops are meant to be accessible to anyone and everyone in the industry, to “get everyone speaking the same language and on the same page across the state,” Hernandez said.

“At the end of the program, you’re going to understand number one, how all these things work together, and number two, where your place is in this cycle,” Warren added.

APEX piloted the workshops back in December, and they’ve been a massive success, reaching nearly 500 people. This spring alone, APEX hosted six workshops across the state. Six more are to come this fall, and then another six in spring 2027.

Warren leads the workshops, and he strives to make them interactive and not, in his words, “death by PowerPoint.

“Our whole premise of training people up to this point was to put them in a room for eight hours, turn the lights off, and turn on the projector,” Warren said.

Some people are visual learners, others are auditory, and some require hands-on experiences to grasp a concept. Warren believes most people are a blend of the three. In the Essentials Workshops, he incorporates videos, live demonstrations, and tactile learning. For example, he recently traveled to East Texas and brought samples of granite back to the APEX office in Buda to use in class.

“Everything around here is limestone, so people don’t know granite well,” he said. “They probably ought to, because they may work in that area.”

To assess their success, Warren and Hernandez look at engagement—are people attending and participating in the workshops? Following the workshops, attendees are asked to complete a survey, scoring the experience. That data shows that the workshops meet the learning objectives APEX set, and that those in attendance are getting something out of them—reviews rank in the “high fours” out of five, Warren said.

What Comes Next

The Essentials Workshops and APEX’s other resources meet two distinct objectives: ensuring workers across Texas follow the same best practices and breaking down asphalt’s complex concepts.

“We want to make the complicated easy,” Warren said. When building the team for APEX, he purposely hired individuals with little to no experience in the asphalt industry. That ensures materials and resources explaining convoluted topics can be understood by all asphalt professionals, whether they’ve been in the industry for eight months or 18 years.

Through its structure, APEX has opened a line of communication, inviting a level of collaboration between stakeholders across asphalt that, until now, hasn’t had a platform.

“We were missing that opportunity to learn from each other and to share what we know, and together we’re going to be better,” Warren said. “We’ve missed that piece of the puzzle, and the more we dig into that, the more I realize how much.”

Asphalt professionals, especially those in Texas, want to give back, collaborate, and provide their expertise to educate the rest of the industry, Hernandez said. The importance of that collaboration cannot be overemphasized. If APEX only worked with one source or organization to build its offerings, it would be a disservice to the people using those resources.

“If we only got one perspective, it would not give us everything we needed to provide the best educational materials,” Hernandez said. “Having all of those perspectives is critical to provide the industry what they need in terms of education.

In its second year, Hernandez and Warren plan to continue building out the program, adding more Essentials Workshops and developing more educational products, including kits filled with materials and other items to bring to workshops and educational sessions. APEX recently added a new Working Group covering flexible pavement inspection, which will explore all the layers of pavement, not just asphalt. More are sure to come.

“We have hundreds of topics we can develop,” Warren said. “As soon as we hit the finish line on one, it’s the starting line for something else.”

For asphalt professionals who haven’t yet engaged with APEX, Hernandez has one message: “we’re here.”

“We’re here to help improve the industry, help make their jobs easier. I don’t think anyone would hate hearing that,” she continued. “I think all of us would love to hear, ‘Hey, I want to try to help make your job easier.’ Let us help you do your job better. Let us help increase that level of knowledge and consistency and quality across asphalt pavement in Texas.

APEX’s door is open not just to those looking to learn, but to those hoping to give back by sharing their experiences, collaborating, and problem solving.

As APEX’s director, Warren hopes to develop the program’s infrastructure in the coming years so that one day he can pass the torch to a new leader. Teamwork is essential to achieve that, as is surrounding himself with experts with the same passion he has: a whole-hearted belief that asphalt is the answer to supporting the infrastructure and people of Texas.

“I feel super blessed to be a part of this,” he said. “In my whole career, I always wanted to do something like this. I never knew what it looked like. It’s way bigger than I thought, but the return on investment is going to be significant.”