 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. I've been in the industry about 31 years and happy to be here. Well, welcome. Thank you for coming on today. All right. Can you tell us what ASA Abloy Academy does within the company? ASA Abloy Academy is the training wing of ASA Abloy Opening Solutions. We are responsible for training of both internal customers, being ASA Abloy employees, as well as external customers, meaning distributors, architects, and users. All right. So can you tell me about the team members that are involved in the academy? Yes. We have a great group of trainers within ASA Abloy in the academy. We have myself. We have Russell Corvo, who's a training specialist. We have Chad Tibbets, who does a lot of our training, as well as some of our professional development with John Lang. We have Katie Flower, who is our code's expert. You're very well aware of Katie. She also does a lot of training all over the country for us. Guy Robinson manages our Ontario-California training center and is well-versed on Keying and Locksmith side of the business. By extension, we also have Rose Cliff Olson, who is a door group trainer. She's not directly in the academy, but we do use her when we have the ability to bring Rose in on glasses. And also on the electromechanical side, we have Russ Anderson and Roger Schmidt, who are based out of our Phoenix location, who do all of the technical training for our electromechanical products based out of the Phoenix location. Great. I mean, wonderful team. We all know Katie. She has our code corner here. Love her. And we're grateful that she gives us some of her time here. All right. So how does the academy deliver some of its training? Well, there are several different ways we can get training to our end users. One of them is online classes. We have about 70 current online classes that are designed to be taken within an hour or so, small bites, so that you're not sitting behind a computer all day. We also offer instructor led training classes, which are from four hours to eight hours to multiple days at our training centers, which are all over the country. We are also doing some virtual training. When COVID hit a few years ago and we were locked down, we started doing virtual classes. We pivoted from instructor led to virtual instructor led. What we're seeing now that we're able to go out and do live training, there's also a need for some expanded virtual classes, not the one hour quick hits like we have been doing, but multiple hour brand centric, product centric classes for those who are just unable to travel due to work restrictions and things like that. We're also looking at some on demand video content within the learning experience platform as well, where we're leaning on the operating companies who are creating some great video content. We're going to house that information there so it can be a one-stop shop for everyone. For our salespeople, we have also developed some what we call DSS lunch and learn programs, so our local reps who are calling on those customers every day can use some properly branded ASA Abloy training content that they can deliver, again, designed to be an hour in length. If a customer wants longer training, we can stack them on one after the other and do an entire day's worth of training. That's all available to the DSS reps on the extra net. You mentioned live training. Where would that be held? We have several live training sessions that we conduct in the northeast. We have Berlin, Connecticut, and New Haven, Connecticut. Moving down the eastern seaboard, we do have a location in Monroe, North Carolina as well as Atlanta, Georgia. In the center part of the country, we have a location in Chicago, Illinois, as well as Dallas, Texas. When we get to the western half of the state, we have LA, Ontario, California. We also have a few other satellite locations that we have ability to use. The local DSS offices also will host classes for us from time to time. We have our trainers regionalized as well in those locations so that it's very easy for us to get to the location to deliver this training for the customer. I would be remiss if I did not also include our mobile instructor-led training vehicle that we have, the MIT. When that started a few years ago, it was an installation-only training center. I've kind of traded the name from the MIT, the mobile installation training to the MILT, but nobody wants to call it MILT. We can go around to the locations and actually conduct several of our instructor-led classes, not just the hands-on portion, but we can do key-in classes at a location and invite a lot of distributors, a lot of end users into that location. Most of the classes that we do in those brick-and-mortar locations. We love having that extra traveling location. Sounds really great. Can you tell me about the Academy's Foundation Training Program? Yes, that is near and dear to my heart. The Foundation Training Program is a six-week long intensive training program and it's designed for people that are new into the industry. For four of the six weeks you are traveling. We start out in Connecticut, in New Haven for a week, in Berlin for a week. We talk all about architectural hardware, applications. We get into part numbers, pricing. We actually do a project where they take off and actually bid a project before the end of that second week. The third week, they get to return back to their office and catch up on emails, etc., etc. We have a couple homework courses that are done on the Academy. The fourth week is in Mason City, Iowa, where we talk all about doors and frames. It kind of follows that same path. The fifth week is back in the office catching up, doing some preliminary work for the sixth week, which is held in Ontario, California, which is all about electronics and access control and systems. We figure by the end of that six weeks, we take a person, say, who has three to six months experience in the industry. They know a little bit, but we've just jump-started their career to about two years' worth of knowledge, fed with a fire hose for that student. We've been getting excellent feedback from the people who have attended. For me, in the six years, seven years that we've been doing this program, it is awesome to see all of the Ossobloy people that have come through it and then moved up within the organization. A few years ago, we added distributors to this. Distributors can send their employees as well. The program is at zero cost to the customer other than their transportation and lodging. We are very, very proud. Through that six weeks, they get to see a lot of the factories. They get factory tours. They get to see how we do it. They get to see the culture of the company. They get to meet all of our trainers and all the different personalities that get to intermix in those six weeks. It's a blast. Yeah, it sounds really great. I know I've given some tours to some of our foundations groups going through. I think it's a really valuable program for anybody that attends. We're very, very proud of that program. All right. Thanks for coming on today, Tom. To learn more about Ossobloy Academy and the courses that are offered, please visit learn.ossobloyacademy.com. I will put a link to that below. Thanks for watching. Thanks, Mia.