Corporate South Africa’s demand for audio-visual solutions is growing at a rapid
pace, but training and professional standards are not keeping up with the expansion
of the market, according to Stefan Mayer, managing director of Corporate AV
Integration

The result of this rapid expansion in the local AV space is that the industry is still
largely dominated by companies that don’t have the technical skills to deliver
complex solutions that clients are currently looking for.

This is hardly surprising. The industry is fiercely competitive, so training often falls
by the wayside in the scramble to win new business and keep customers happy.

These retrenchments are forcing more people to create their own businesses, which
means that there are many more unqualified companies vying for a piece of the
pie. And for clients, it’s hard to sort the credible players from the fly-by-nights.


Complicating the picture is the fact that our business is a multidisciplinary one,
which also needs some understanding of IT, environmental design and more. But for
the long term health of our industry, we need to place more of a focus in
professional standards, based on the latest international best practices.

Even though the industry is largely unregulated, international standards and
certifications are a good place to start. For example, InfoComm provides a range
of best practices and training courses to the industry. InfoComm is the trade
association representing the professional audiovisual and information
communications industries worldwide. Its university offers a range of courses
covering management, design and installation of AV solutions.

Though they are somewhat North-America centric, these courses are a good way to
benchmark basic proficiency. Someone with the InfoComm Certified Technology
Specialist (CTS) certification has demonstrated his or her audiovisual knowledge
and skills in an exam. At Corporate AV, we use this as our basic benchmark.

The Southern African Communications Industries Association (SACIA) – a trade
association that promotes adoption of professional standards and ethical business
practice in the communications industry – has partnered with InfoComm.

Executive director Kevan Jones says that he hopes that government and universities
will back the work SACIA and InfoComm are doing to bring relevant AV
qualifications to South Africa. SACIA members get a discount on InfoComm
Training. In addition, suppliers such as TID and Electrosonic offer free training to
help build the local skills base.

In addition to this industry training, there is certainly no shortage of manufacturer-
based training. Good AV solutions providers will invest in keeping their staff
certified to work on the latest products from the leading vendors, in addition will
encourage them to be certified with InfoComm.

This is, as I mentioned earlier, just a starting point. As an industry, we should start
looking at what we can do to create a solid base of skills for the future as well as to
further professionalise our industry.

It is in our interests to lift standards so that we can improve customer satisfaction
and demonstrate the value of services for which we charge good money. SACIA can
offer some independent guidance to recruiters in the AV industry as they look for
skills.

Perhaps we need to initiate discussions with universities and technical colleges, with
a view to getting AV courses on the curriculum alongside traditional IT courses? We
should almost certainly start thinking more about career paths that we can offer
young people entering the industry.

Given the wide and often technical skill sets required by the AV industry – IT skills
as well as electrical, sound and electronic engineering skills – practical
apprenticeships could help cultivate the people we need. All too often people are
learning from sales and management rather than from the trade, resulting in poor
skills transfer.

It’s also important for corporate clients in the AV sector to start holding their AV
integrators to higher standards. They should ask their integrators what
qualifications their employees have and what sort of investment they make in
training their people.

Just as an enterprise wouldn’t want someone without the relevant certification
tinkering with its networks and servers, it should not allow someone without the
right qualifications to work on its AV products and systems.