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REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2024 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE I I-CONNECT007 29 Marcy LaRont: Pierre-Jean, congratula- tions on this very important and prestigious award. What does receiving this highly esteemed Hall of Fame Award mean to you? Pierre-Jean Albrieux: Thank you, Marcy. It's a great honor because this award, through the IPC, is given by my peers. I have great pride, and it was a big surprise when John (Mitchell) told me I was get- ting the Hall of Fame Award. I was very, very surprised, even amazed. Why? I don't know. Maybe because I am the first non-American to obtain the Raymond E. Pritchard Hall of Fame Award, which has existed since 1977. I am the first European, and, of course, the first French. You have been an industry member for a long time. What is your focus, and what does it mean to be part of this industry? IFTEC is a specialized training center for the manufacturing of printed circuit boards. We offer continuous training courses on the design and manufacture of printed cir- cuits and on the different soldering tech- niques of components and assemblies. In this area, we have 26 specialized courses. The second part of our business is IPC certi- fications for personnel, including CID, CID+, IPC-A-600, IPC-J-STD-001, IPC-A-610, IPC- A-620, and IPC-7711/21. We offer 18 certi- fications. We also do analysis and expertise work in our training center. Finally, we sell IPC standards. In certification training, we address the needs of engineers, technicians, and op- erators of industrial companies—users of electronic assemblies (PCB and PCBA). Our workshops deliver practical training. Either the trainees come to us in our training cen- ters, or, quite frequently, our trainers go into the companies. It is a captivating job. It gives us the oppor- tunity to work on the electronic boards of a huge variety of products, from drill heads and submarines to satellites and everything in between. We realize, in the context of manufacturing, that the production issues are the same for everyone. We train and cer- tify approximately 1,700 trainees per year. When did you get involved with IPC, and what compelled you to become involved with it? It's a very long story, and by the way, I am a child of IPC, and a child of Europe. I was born in 1957, and since then, the purpose of IPC has been to propose standards. It's what we call in France, more precisely, referen- tials, or guides of good practice. The objective of IFTEC is to provide practical training for the manufacturing of electronic assemblies. Both at IPC and IFTEC, a single word has guided our approach: pragmatism. Consequently, the relationships between IPC and IFTEC came naturally. When we first started the training on the manufacturing of