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JANUARY 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 47 Johnson: Do you see that same dynamic for your more commercial students when you're doing IPC training, soldering training, certifica- tion training for a company with their staff— not in educational, but in industrial? Do you see that same need to connect with a reason? Lambert: The students that we get are not nec- essarily young; they're typically a different age bracket, and they're working for different rea- sons, and to maintain their jobs they have to get trained. That keeps them employable, and it makes them employable at other companies. English as a second language has become a big deal for us. Everybody can read a picture: explaining what to do first, then using the sec- ond picture for the next step and so forth, then they will understand the process. It takes pa- tience! Occasionally, in some of my classes, a student says, "Well, I just got out of the mili- tary academy and I've got a job working at a local company. They want me to come to this class to understand what goes on with boards." I say, "Great." And the way that person re- ceives and understands the material is com- pletely different than a student who's 50 years old. Recently graduated students who come to our classes still have the knack of studying and their minds absorb anything new, whereas the 50-year-old needs different methods to ful- ly understand the knowledge being delivered. But having that diversity in our classroom really makes it interesting. We've got some classes where we have PhDs as students and our instructors are asking them, "How do I handle this? You know a heck of a lot more than I do." I remind our instructors they're the teacher, and the PhD needs a certificate, so give them the information and let them take it. Although these PhDs are very smart, they also need to pick up new material, so when you talk to them, you make sure your notebook is open, because you're going to take some notes from these students. Johnson: We've been dealing for an extended period time with the pandemic and changes in business habits; what do you see for the next 12 to 24 months? Even if it didn't change the business we do, everybody has been affected, especially as to how we connect. How has the training business changed because of it? Lambert: We have 17–19 instructors scattered all over the United States and Canada, and we still conduct classes at the facility in Manches- ter, New Hampshire. But most of them are the hands-on, workmanship-type skills develop- ment classes. Last March when this thing hit, it clamped down on everybody. Everybody said, "What are we going to do at this point?" That's when we decided, "Let's see if we can do something online." We set up a studio, allowing our instructors to teach their classes online from home. It's in- teresting because it allowed students to attend from anywhere. You could have a kid in a class from California and another from Europe. It of- fers and provides the students that opportunity. As a matter of fact, we recently had a meet- ing with all the instructors, and we talked about this situation. We told them that we're going to continue online courses because it syncs with the school programs that you see in various communities; we're going to do both online and hybrid classes. The online thing has been working very well for us. We're also looking at programs that we've developed, not simply waiting for IPC to come up with other programs. These new programs could be in the form of a very short video or answer a question, that type of thing. We believe online classes will be a big deal in the next year because of the cost savings to companies. You don't have to send people to