Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1535954
Bert Is your new training center meet- ing your expectations? We're starting it slow, and we've been pretty pleased with the prog- ress. Right now, we are set up to do one class per month, and as we add different disciplines, we know we will continue to grow. You also have multiple locations for in-room or in-person training: Tampa, Florida, and Baltimore. Why did you choose Florida? The weather! I'm just kidding. We have a good customer base in Flor- ida, and there are maybe one or two training centers in the South- east that are addressing the Flor- ida market. We picked that loca- tion because it's easy to cross-polli- nate between Baltimore and Tampa. If I don't have the resources in the Tampa office, I can move some- one very easily from Baltimore down there for a class. I have multiple peo- ple who can travel and train in dif- ferent locations. Our in-classroom goals are to have a professional environment, and our location in Tampa has a nice office space. One of the advantages is a test center connected to these classrooms, so we can offer a hands- on learning experience with The Test Connection equipment and resources. We're leveraging that with hands-on labs, and we're in the process of adding some equipment to our test floor. The Training Connection will utilize those assets: The "human asset" is with the test engineers, and the "equip- ment asset" allows for hands-on practice—they can look, inspect, test, and see how a test solution does certain things this or that way. Is that unique in the test world, or are there other train- ing centers that offer that sort of experience? There are a couple, but they're not that prevalent. Most training focuses on hands-on soldering. If you're doing sol- dering and rework capabilities, you need to know how to use a soldering iron and rework a board, remove a chip, put a chip on, and touch this up. But when you start talking about the capi- tal assets of a flying probe or a boundary scan, you're no longer talking about a $200 soldering iron. These tools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Test Connection has been blessed because we have partners and vendors who want to participate, so we can leverage The Test Connection name and partnership to help grow The Training Connection with hands-on learning on the flying probe or learning on a boundary scan. When you consider setting up a training center, you're bringing an already-ingrained business philosophy that's ready to do business. Talk to me about your business philosophy. When you look at our business model, our staff has a knowledge base and real-world experience that we'll use when training. Our trainers will be showing our students how certain things are done with the equipment, disseminating our knowledge base through a training program that leads to a certification, whether it's an IPC certification or a Training Connection program. Our goal is to bet- ter the industry, and hopefully, the trainees will be successful, whether into a career or making a career jump. We see it as four steps—knowledge, training, certification, and success—that will lead to other opportunities. Who is signing up for the classes? What's the demographic? They are quality managers, new students entering the industry, and existing Test Connection customers. If you train a person in a certain technique and style, they can grow within a company. They create their own value-add in that sense. We haven't really seen too many people from a new company that we have never heard of or that we don't know anything about. These are from existing Test Connection partnerships and customers that we're already doing work for. We're growing in our own ecosystem.