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64 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2026 trainers are superstars in their own right, Lambert brings it home with an abundance of passion and wise words for all. He's been with EPTAC since 1996 and is the face of the company, according to his colleagues. In fact, he may be the face of IPC standards and certification training in North Amer- ica. He's also the author of "Learning with Leo," a popular I-Connect007 column. Lambert also started his career at DEC, getting involved in specifications when his boss asked him to attend some IPC committee meetings in his place. "Initially, the OEMs (chiefly DEC and IBM) wanted to get rid of their quality manuals, so it was decided to put all of that information into IPC specifications," he said. This first brought IPC manufacturing specifications into true prominence. "In 1994, the Department of Defense (DoD) under Secretary William Perry announced a shift from using exclusively military specifications to com- mercial," which upleveled the importance of IPC manufacturing specifications yet again. In 1976, there were three big standards: IPC-J- STD-001, IPC-A-600, and IPC-A-610. Lambert said it was a lot easier to get consensus back then, with only 10–20 participants in a group meeting vs. more than 100 today. He's proud that, despite what may seem like constant change, the stan- dards have held up well over time, and that 50 years later, he's still active in both creating new IPC standards and modifying existing ones. Training is where it all began. "Industry volun- teers wrote the first training program for IPC-A- 600, folks like Dieter Bergman, Ralph Hersey, and me," Lambert said. "Training back in the day was an engineer doing a presentation or work- shop, and someone saying, 'We need to do a train- ing around that.' What started out as a workshop was broken down into steps to create a training program, and if you presented the paper, you were on the hook. That's how it started." While it seems that technology is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, Lambert offers grounded and wise counsel. "The technology is not changing as fast as people think," he said. "What's changing is the density; the methodology is the same at the core. We have two cultures that are coming head- to-head: the semiconductor business on one side and PCBs on the other. Will we need new tools? Will we need new (manufacturing) methods? How do we manage them coming together?" No matter how it plays out, Lambert said it's es- sential to stay involved in the standards process. "You have to be involved in standards!" he said. Training at EPTAC has been so effective and has allowed for tremendous growth for over 35 years because of its focus on how they teach and train, and on how they deliver the content to the audi- ence in front of them to ensure they get what they need, Lambert said. "People don't learn today the way they learned 30 years ago," he said of each new generation. "We always need to be taking a look at different (train- ing) methodologies, and we need to talk to, not only the industry companies that make the products, but also the educators. This needs to happen in late grammar school to early high school." Even all these years later, what he enjoys most about training is seeing that aha moment with his students, when they really understand the con- cepts. He ended our conversation with a big Leo Lambert smile, encouraging everyone, "Enjoy what you are doing. Keep studying. Keep learning and share your knowledge." EPTAC and its dynamic and talented training team are certainly doing that. SMT007