 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today, I'm joined by Tom Seidel. Tom, please introduce yourself and tell us about your role here. Hi, Mia. My name is Tom Seidel. I'm the Manager of Training and Education for ASA Abloy Academy. Before you mentioned the new learning experience platform, so when is that going to be released? The new LXP, as we call it, will be live by August 5th, and it's going to be a great game changer for anyone that has done previous online learning in the academy. The program is much more robust. The interface between the user and the system is much easier to find a class, to sign up for a class, to manage people in a class. It's going to be 10-fold better than what we ever had in the past. All right, so you said managing. So a company will be able to manage their employees and their trajectory in the LXP? Yes, we used to call it the My Team functionality. So how it works is if a customer or distributor decides that they want to assign classes to their employees and monitor their progress, we would have a program in place where they could then list out all of their employees. And through the LXP, they could go in and assign the classes to them and watch their progress. Well, the new platform that we're released will actually take it one step further. In the past, there was a two-step process. They would have to reach out to us to add a new employee or to take an employee away if they just have it from the company. Now it gives that power to that manager in the group. And as soon as somebody signs on, if it's XYZ company, we recognize that domain name and say, all right, you're part of this team. They're automatically put into that team. They don't have to do a separate process. It is a very easy, streamlined process, very easy to manage. And unfortunately, people do leave the company. In the past, they would have had to reach out to us and we would have to inactivate them, take them out of their team. Well, the manager can actually do that right from the platform on their dashboard. Very easy, very interactive program. Yeah, sounds like a nice user upgrade. All right, so can you give us a little sneak peek? Are there any new Academy training programs on the horizon? There actually are. One of the biggest feedback items that we get from end users and professional locksmiths is the difficulty of onboarding new people. Finding new people is tough, but getting them trained and up to speed is just as tough. So similar to our foundation training program, we're developing something for that professional locksmith side. And we're going to call it the locksmith Academy program. And it's going to be three levels, a beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It will be a lot of in-person training, some online content as well. Very, very much hands-on. So that, again, once they complete each level, they are more of an asset to their company. We are very, very excited. We're going through some testing right now. We will be reaching out to some of our end users and some of our locksmith partners to help us test the platform so that we can make sure that we're hitting their needs. And that should be released later this fall. That sounds awesome. What would be the most surprising thing for people to find out about the Academy? I would say literally the amount of experience that the Academy trainers have combined. If you added up our team, as well as the Phoenix team, as well as Rose, we've got well over 230 years worth of combined experience. And that knowledge, everyone in the group is well able to transfer that knowledge to the learner. And everyone in the group is very approachable, very easy to work with. I think it would be refreshing, I'll say that. I do believe, frankly, and I'm a little pointed, but I believe that we have the best training group in the industry. All right, do you have any final thoughts to share with us today? Well, I'd invite everyone to check out the platform. We're gonna be able to host, again, the online, you'll find all of our instructor-led, our virtual training. One of the things that we're able to do through the new platform that we weren't with the older platform is to host the classes on the Academy site as well as put that into your transcripts so you would have your learning path always kept in your transcript. So you can always go back and print off your certificates of completion for your employer, or if you're using them for continuing education points within the industry, there are a few partners that we approved for learning continuing education points. So all those records are housed in the Academy and will be forever. All right, thanks for coming on today, Tom. To learn more about Osa Abloy Academy and the courses that are offered, please visit learn.osaabloyacademy.com and I will put a link to that below. Thanks for watching. Thanks, Mia.