Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/819981
May 2017 • The PCB Magazine 83 Roberson: That's really the big one: What are we going to do as the retirees move along and then the baby boomers, and even the next group? We need to pass along this knowledge. Goldman: Yes, and quickly. Bergman: Exactly. For example, we have some plating folks that do great troubleshooting and have the background, useful education informa- tion and knowledge that comes from 20+ years of experience. How can you boil that down or capture that experience so that it's available for somebody who's got five years or less in the in- dustry? We see a need for that in the printed cir- cuit board area. We certainly see it in the assem- bly area and so that's something that we're also considering to try to capture. You've got guys like Mike Carano who has done education classes forever. Wouldn't it be great to have a virtual Mike and capture some of his education and knowledge for delivery via IPC EDGE? This way Mike would be available anywhere/anytime for people that just can't travel or who want to learn outside of working hours. To be able to pass the lore you've got to capture the lore. Industry experts will retire one day and if you can preserve knowledge collect- ed from decades of experience, the industry will be better off for it. You have to be able to take something that worked in a face-to-face workshop and make it so that it's a useful training tool. I was learn- ing something about instructional design just yesterday. You've got to now deal with online learning and make sure whatever you're devel- oping is useful for the medium that you're de- livering it in, and the first thing is you can't have somebody sit around for two hours and then have a coffee break, because there are no coffee breaks. You need to break the learning into chunks, in some fashion, so that people feel they can do it in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes here and there, so it's not so over- whelming. Goldman: In the online learning you have now, certainly somebody can hit a pause button and come back in five minutes, or doesn't it work that way? Bergman: It does work that way, and that gives you some availability there, but at some point when you're developing a class you need to con- sider how you are going to best drive knowledge retention. How are you going to have the peo- ple demonstrate the knowledge? Is it just push- ing information to you or do you want them to take a quiz? Whatever the learning is, you want the learning to be effective and you have to consider that while you're initially pulling it together. Roberson: Along those lines, if we jump back to EDGE here, we've got a couple of things that we're calling the foundation courses, which are aimed toward the younger crowd. We've basi- cally taken some of the existing video courses and each one has a document of completion. I hesitate to call it a certificate just because that gets confused with the official IPC certification, and for the most part they're not a certifica- tion as such, they're just informational. But for example, it contains foundational courses for 6010 and 7711, and it goes through the solder- ing 101, the ESD program, the basic seven sins of soldering, etc. We've got those available that could be used all the way down into the high school level, plus on EDGE we do have the new ESD pro- gram that we just put out. It is a certification program in conjunction with the ESD/EOS As- sociation. I like to call them the ESDA because it's easier to say, but it's a course where some- one who wants to be an instructor can go on and get certified as a CET, Certified ESD Trainer, INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE—PREPARING THE NEXT GENERATION Mike Carano