Say, all you training-minded security professionals, here’s some good news. PSA Security Network, provider of the plentiful PSA-TEC conference, is taking the show on the road. Well, sort of. The systems integrator cooperative announced this week it will expand its educational offerings beyond the annual conference with a new PSA Education Tour.
Geared toward sales professionals, project managers, business owners and decision makers, each regional tour stop will comprise two days’ worth of business management and technical sales instruction. Significantly, the program is free and open to all industry professionals. The program will consist of vendor- and service provider-hosted sessions. Among the featured topics will be managed services, wireless deployments, remote monitoring, health-care deployments, mass notification and commercial sound.
To learn more about the why and what of it all, I put in call to Sharon Shaw, PSA’s director of education, who said the whole theme for the education tour is “new profits made easy.”
“It’s all about new vertical markets, new applications, new services, anything that people can do to add a new [offering] to what they are currently doing,” Shaw says.
This new initiative is also about providing accessibility to training for the wider installation community.
“PSA-TEC has been around for a long time but the problem is that it’s only once a year. If a company hires somebody in June, and PSA-TEC was just in May, they are not going to wait 11 months to get them trained,” she says.
In devising the tour’s itinerary, PSA went about selecting cities that have an abundance of integrators — large and small — within an hour’s driving distance.
“That way if there is travel involved it’s just a quick road trip and a stay overnight if they need to. We are trying to make it convenient,” Shaw says.
The first tour stop will roll into Pine Brook, N.J., July 28-29. You can learn more details about that offering here. Future dates scheduled thus far:
- Houston: Sept. 14-15
- Scottsdale, Ariz.: Nov. 9-10
- Irvine, Calif.: Jan. 11-12, 2011
- Denver: Feb 9-10, 2011
- Atlanta: March 1-2, 2011
The PSA Education Tour is part of larger expansion of educational offerings from PSA. In the coming months, PSA will begin biweekly Webinars and other interactive online training. A Web site redesign is in the works as well that will include comprehensive training videos and an online calendar where security professionals can find links to all major industry training events.
Rodney Bosch | Managing Editor
SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION