For PCIA President Jonathan Adelstein, this year’s State of the Union address was something of an epiphany. The former FCC commissioner realized that the White House was hard at work on an issue that is near and dear to the wireless industry: skills-based technical training. This week, that hard work came to fruition in the form of $450 million in job-driven training grants, with more than $5 million going directly to programs targeting wireless infrastructure.
The White House initiative dovetailed with work already underway at PCIA. Now wireless training programs funded through the Department of Labor will be part of the curriculum at Virginia State University and at South Carolina’s Aiken Technical College, which is already the certification partner for Warriors 4 Wireless. Adelstein said that PCIA will develop the curriculum in partnership with leading tower companies, carriers and some smaller infrastructure service providers.
“We want to make it go all the way to a Bachelor of Science in RF engineering,” said Adelstein. “We need more people with training in RF because technical schools and community colleges aren’t teaching that. Technical schools and community colleges aren’t really teaching any wireless education at this point. We’ve just begun to get these two schools, Aiken Technical College and Virginia State, going on a curriculum that really fits this industry’s needs.”
Chief among those needs is bringing workers up to speed quickly to fill the pipeline. The basic wireless coursework at Aiken Technical and Virginia State can be completed in eight weeks, and students will have the option of returning for more at a later date if they want to work toward a degree.
“It can work toward an associate’s degree program and ultimately a bachelor’s degree,” said Adelstein. He described the curriculum as “stacked and latticed,” meaning that students will be able to stack courses to get to a certification or degree, and they will be able to interlace them with other courses from other disciplines if they choose a different degree program.
Adelstein says that PCIA plans to expand the curriculum to other schools, with the goal of producing 5,000 wireless-ready graduates within the next five years. Of course not all those graduates will be tower climbers.
“Not everybody wants to climb a tower, but they still want to work in this industry, so we will offer programs in small cells, DAS, project management and site acquisition,” said Adelstein.
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