In August, AGMA President Matt Croson held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for National Training Center (NTC), in partnership with Richard J. Daley College, in Chicago. The AGMA NTC provides industry-focused events and training for gear manufacturing professionals and year-round classes for novices and experts alike.
The NTC just had the ribbon cutting back in August. Can you give a little bit of the back story?
Daley College has these buildings in one part of their campus, and we lease out a building. At the ribbon cutting, we showcased the new signs we had put up both outside and inside the building. We want to house a lot of our classes here because Chicago is an ideal, centralized hub and many of the classes utilize the machines we have here.
Can you speak to on-site training?
Yes! It’s expanding. We got quite a few inquiries this past year alone. From what I see, if they have a large enough group, they want to reach out and try to do training on their own terms. And that’s where a lot of that on-site training comes into play.
Let’s say they have this group of 10 to 20 people, and they want to get them all trained on this one specific topic—companies inquire for us to bring an instructor to them instead of them paying to send all their employees to us. Ten registrations, for example, to come to a class, plus then all the travel and whatnot for each of those individuals can add up quickly. They can save some money by having that training at their facility, and then the nice beneficial thing about it is we can make it directly applicable to the people who are in the class.
What makes it nice with on-site training is you can address detailed questions. And a lot of that information is often proprietary. In a regular class context, you wouldn’t be able to share that kind of information where 20 different organizations might be represented. On-site training holds a lot of value for the companies they serve. We’ve already scheduled four for next year and we haven’t even finished the month of November.
That’s fantastic!
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of interest in it, which is really great because of that customizability.
How does that side of it work? This is a service that can be developed regardless of whether the company is an AGMA member.
Correct. We don’t care if they’re a member or nonmember. The pricing will change, so that does play a factor, but that also applies to all of our other classes. We have member rates and then our nonmember rates. For example, we have a group through the government that is in a couple of classes now. They’re not members, but they reached out to us because they know we can provide the good training that they’re looking for.
Why don’t they hire their own consultants?
They could easily reach out to the consultant themselves if they wanted to—and I’m sure we’ve had some companies who have gone directly to the consultant instead—but one of the benefits of doing it through AGMA is that you obviously get the certificates of completion, and if an AGMA representative goes, we are also accredited to offer the Continuing Education Units (CEUs) which is something some states require on an annual basis for those with professional licenses.
We just went through the reaccreditation process and have officially been reaccredited for another five years to offer CEUs, so that’s exciting.
Are there any closing thoughts?
We offer a ton of different things for members and nonmembers alike. We want to continue to offer and improve the great classes that we currently have and continue to offer additional courses on topics that are of interest to our constituents. The AGMA is constantly trying to expand and investigate where we can move and introduce new topics and new ideas to make sure that we’re staying up to date on topics just as everybody else is.
Gear standards don’t play a huge part in the classes, but they do come up, especially when we’re talking about design and all those specifications. AGMA education ties into each different piece at AGMA from the standards to membership as well. We can encourage people to get membership if they like our courses and continue to bring and send people to our courses.
The closed loop.
Closed loop, yeah. It’s fun getting to meet all these great people. I enjoy getting to know each person and getting to know the instructors.
The outfitting of the facility has been made possible by generous donations of time, dollars, machinery, and materials to the AGMA Foundation. It is an incredible industry resource to train and upskill new and experienced workers within the gear industry.
