Brushing up with continuing education

With the ever-changing landscape of the wireless industry, continuing education and training are essential for lengthening careers of engineers and technicians.

“You have a continuous flow of people into the industry,” said Herschel Shosteck, Shosteck Group (www.shosteck.com) president. “Universities give general educations; they don’t give specific educations. So, you have a lot of people who are electronic engineers, but don’t know the specific nuts and bolts of a really applied technology.”

Continuing education programs at colleges and universities and in-house and outside training programs can help those engineers understand and be able to work with new or unfamiliar technology.

“These kinds of programs are designed specifically to deal with issues in the industry, with critical issues, strategic issues,” Shosteck said. “The issue is to provide a prospective, to provide an education that will enable staff personnel to do their jobs better.”

The continuing education program at the University of Wisconsin, (www.wisc.edu) where Shosteck occasionally teaches, offers a wide variety of courses for engineers in the wireless industry. In total, they do about 30 2- to 4-day courses a year.

From Fundamentals of Wireless Data Communication to Ensuring Power Quality in a Deregulated Environment, the courses offer a crosshatching of the technology and hot topics in the industry.

“We try to emphasize the practical aspects in our courses,” said Dan Danbeck, director of telecommunications programming with the Department of Engineering and Professional Development at the university. “It’s impossible to completely divorce it from theory and mathematics, but we can emphasize those aspects that people will be able to utilize in their job.”

Continuing education for wireless professionals is so important to the industry that in 1997 a group of wireless companies and academic institutions collaborated to form the Global Wireless Education Consortium. The group’s goal is to increase the quality and quantity of engineers and technicians in the wireless field.

“They’re basically a consortium of manufacturers, service providers and universities that joined together to improve continuing education,” Danbeck said.

The group boasts such members as AT&T Wireless (www.attwireless.com ), Ericsson (www.ericsson.com ), Nokia (www.nokia.com ) and Verizon (www.verizon.com ), as well as Utah State University (www.usu.edu), the University of Colorado (www.colorado.edu) and Ball State University (www.bsu.edu), among others.

But, universities aren’t the only institutions that provide continuing education and training for wireless professionals. TWS International (www.twsinternational.com ) announced this week that its Training Service Group achieved record revenue levels during the first six months of this year. Rich Hall, TWS director of advanced technology, said the slowing market seemed to be helping their company.

“With how difficult the economy and industry have been for the last six months, if anything the training ends up being more critical because it’s so important to make sure we’re getting the most our of the people we have,” Hall said.

Hall said his company’s programs differed from university programs because TWS takes the classes to a service provider. For most university programs, attendees must get to the college town for the classes.

“The university courses end up being great, but one of the problems seems to be the travel,” Hall said. “If you’re sending one person, then that’s probably a cost effective way to do it. But, if you’re going to try to train large groups of people, then it’s much more cost-effective to have a single trainer go to a particular location.”

Both Hall and Danbeck said their courses focused on new technology, specifically the industry’s move to 2.5G and eventually 3G. Shosteck said the training and continuing programs can be valuable tools for engineers who are working to improve their understanding. “The issue of any technology is not its theoretical elegance. It’s the number of engineering man and woman years that have gone into developing it,” Shosteck said.