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AUGUST 2021 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 63 100,000 downloads. We have a monthly news- letter and that performs well. It's opened by tens of thousands of people, and it is translated into six languages, so it has a global audience. We have our main Altium YouTube channel, which has many videos and playlists. e Alti- umLive content lives there and is always acces- sible. e other channel that's really taken off is the Altium Academy YouTube Channel. at's where we put a lot of our educational resources. ere are video versions of the podcast on our main YouTube. Our on-demand webinars are on both channels, so it's a good aggregator of our educational content. Shaughnessy: Now, at your live events, you drew more designers than I've ever seen at a show. Didn't you have 300 designers at the last AltiumLive? Warner: Yes. Actually, we had 500 designers at our last live conferences, both in San Diego and Frankfurt. However, we had over 2,000 per location when we went virtual and had over 8,000 people register. So, the appetite for edu- cation is there. We now have a full-time head of education, Rea Callender, and he's work- ing with his team to develop Altium Academy, which will be more of a formal process-driven initiative. We're going to double down on edu- cating designers. I've been handing off all I can to Rea and am very excited about what he and his team are doing as he gets the Academy off the ground. I think that's due to launch in the October/ November timeframe. Rea put together our Upverter student education for high schools and universities, but then he will also be work- ing on tightening up the quality of education. Eventually we're going to have a certification program and do all kinds of exciting things, so stay tuned for that. Like many, our education team believes that training needs to be in bite- size pieces, modular, chaptered, and digest- ible, and then you have something meaningful at the end. It's immediate ROI that shows up for design engineers in their next day at work and that's why we think credentialing eventu- ally is going to be somewhere we absolutely need to go. Shaughnessy: You mentioned the Academy about a year ago; it was just about to get started. Warner: Yes, then COVID hit, and it was side- lined temporarily. But now it's fully underway, and it's got traction. Rea will also be working with the IPC Education Foundation during AltiumLive. I think they might be doing some student design competitions with high school students; we really believe that we must expose, engage, and inspire students at the high school level so they know what to major in at univer- sity. e Upverter education program is grow- ing like a weed, and we're hoping Rea will do the same thing for university students and then for professionals, and eventually we will offer certification. So when you get this training, you'll be able to test and certify against it with proctored exams and put it on your resume. Shaughnessy: As we see with these classes, even online during COVID, people are thirsty for design knowledge. Judy Warner