SMT007 Magazine

SMT007-Feb2025

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12 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2025 ers want to see the new technology in addition to technical resources and having network- ing opportunities. It's a good way to stay con- nected to your community and for our up-and- coming young professionals and students to find mentorship and career opportunities. Chapter meetings will often have a guest speaker. How involved is SMTA in identifying or arranging chapter guest speakers? e local chapters use their personal connec- tions to find speakers, but we will help them if needed. We have a database of speakers from prior SMTA conferences and meetings. Each time someone speaks at an event, they are added to our database. Speakers can then select topics in their areas of expertise. Our board of directors is great for providing speak- ers and topics as well. That's a great resource. One of our projects this past year was to clean up that database and look for trend- ing topics. We also confirmed with speakers whether they wanted to remain on the data- base so that it remains an even more effec- tive tool for the chapters. Have you found any additional topics in that review process? AI is an upcoming topic trend, including how companies can incorporate AI into their ever yday procedures. Reliability in harsh environments remains an ongoing and ver y popular topic. What resources do you have available for your members? is year, we have improved access to online training courses for members. Previously, new members received one free course per year, but starting in January, all the courses are now included for members to access, which I think is a great value. Our SMT processes certification will con- tinue to be a paid course, but it's more in- depth and aimed at a smaller group of individ- uals. SMTA is growing, and we have more staff to create more of these educational programs. Members also get discounts on all the events, including webinars, that non-members have to pay for. We have a knowledge base where we upload the webinars for anytime access. Our corporate members get even more discounts for things like expos. We have conference proceedings, journal arti- cles, chapter events, and on-demand webinars. You can filter the content, and do a search based on author, organization, and date published. You can search by topic and keyword to pull up items as well. It's quite extensive. You can also use the knowledge base to see what potential speakers have published on certain topics. It's a good resource for the chapter officers. What are your initiatives for 2025, and how do you want to help move the chapters forward? We just introduced a new structure for forming chapters. It's called an alliance group. is new structure could be either for chapters in forma- tion, or chapters struggling to meet the min- imum requirements for a chapter. It's a more loosely structured formation that doesn't have all the financial requirements and other orga- nizational restrictions chapters have.

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