PCIA has won a $750,000 grant from the Department of Labor to establish standards for wireless training programs and
certifications to enable workers to meet those standards. The grant is part of the federal government’s broad initiative to fund job-specific training, a program which includes more than $5 million for wireless training programs.
“I think we won the grant because it fits exactly with what the Administration is talking about,” said PCIA president and CEO Jonathan Adelstein. “These training programs will prepare workers for jobs that are open right now.”
The PCIA grant is part of a $3.25 million grant awarded to Virginia State University to fund wireless training programs. The maximum amount that any one school could win under this federal program was $2.5 million, but the Department of Labor awarded an extra $750,000 as a special bonus because the VSU is cooperating with an industry association.
Phil Larsen, PCIA’s director of education training, will be a key part of the new initiative. Larsen was director of operations at Nexius before joining PCIA.
“He actually knows how to deploy small cells, he knows how to work on towers,” said Adelstein. “But he also understands the broader range of how to create an educational program. Under the grant we have additional resources now to hire additional personnel and subject matter experts.”
The grant will also give PCIA resources to create a database that will track the training levels of individual workers, and will be accessible to employers through mobile devices.
“We’re going to make sure that it’s verifiable in the field,” said Adelstein, adding that PCIA will work closely with its industry partners to create both the database and the training programs. Those partners include all the major tower companies as well as leading carriers and infrastructure service providers.
“All of that is going to be created by the industry for the industry,” said Adelstein. He hopes that the database will be live in six months to a year. But Adelstein said that not many people will have the necessary training and certification within that time frame, and that PCIA wants to be sure that the new database does not create an unnecessary hurdle for people who are already qualified to work in the tower industry.
In addition to tower training, PCIA plans on establishing training programs for DAS, small cells, project management and site acquisition. RF engineering is another important area of focus.
“We want to take this all the way to more advanced training for people that want to be RF engineers,” said Adelstein. “So someone could have a whole career.”
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