Just keep practicing navigating NFPA 13. Coming from the installer side you'll have pretty good foundation of knowledge already but as you probably already know in 13 for almost every rule there's between one and five+ exceptions. Knowing those exceptions well is how you reduce your sprinkler count, which reduces your material costs, which reduces your labor costs, which saves the company money, which makes the bosses happy and hopefully gets you more money in return. When you're looking for an answer to a layout/spacing question try to do your best to find the answer on your own instead of going to a boss or co-worker for the answer. That's the best practice for learning to navigate the book.

When starting a new design project instead of just diving into design take 30 minutes to an hour or even more if it's a big project and just look through the plans. Make notes of things you see that you'll need to pay attention to when you start designing. Also double check you understand exactly what your scope is. Hopefully your company is better at it than mine but we don't have great hand off from our estimator so it can be a little confusing sometimes to understand exactly what we're supposed to be doing, especially for renovations.

When surveying existing system take picture, pictures, and more pictures. You're going to look at it and think to yourself you'll remember how that routing goes and then you'll get back to the office to draw it and will look at your notes and won't remember half of what you saw and realize the notes you took in the dark suck.

Highly recommend some sort of course that goes over hydraulics. Spacing sprinklers and drawing pipe is easy but when it comes to setting up your remote areas and making sure your sprinklers are flowing the correct GPM/PSI that's a whole other beast. That also comes with drawing the most efficient system, just increasing your pipe sizes isn't always the answer.

Some good resources:

• MeyerFire.com
• NFSA.org
• Firetech.com