Electronic Media Published 3-21-94 NOTE: This is the UN-EDITED VERSION! To Maintain Quality, Don't Skip Continued Training By - Joe Fedele A colleague of mine once tried to allocate $2000 into his operating budget for the purpose of sending one of his engineers to a technical course on videotape machine maintenance. His boss was obviously annoyed at the prospect and replied, "let them be stupid" as he red lined the spread sheet. "I don't have that kind of money to waste on teaching people things they should already know". Those comments were an unconscionable blunder which showed a thorough lack of understanding of the needs of his staff and the operation of his facility. While this amount of money may seem to be excessive for training one technician on one piece of equipment the return on that investment cannot be measured on an accountant's ledger. Make no mistake about it, this is an investment you are making. Try, if you will, to imagine yourself doing a complete overhaul on your car's engine with no formal training. It's a near impossibility. And if you do succeed there is a very high probability that you will misalign a key part to the point where irreparable harm could be caused to the vehicle. The same holds true for a videotape machine. A simple misalignment of a tape head can render it useless. The cost of one single head for a D-2 machine is over two thousand dollars. In this one instance you have just blown away the budget for that school. Education is not something that should be taken for granted. The simple truth is that no college or university teaches what we do. Nor is there a formal degree for broadcast engineering. Broadcast engineering is a very specialized field that requires specific, hands on experience. In some cases the only providers of this specialized schooling is the equipment manufacturers themselves. The last thing you want is to have your technicians learning on maintenance time. This is inefficient, costly, and could even be destructive to equipment at your facility. During the age of the vacuum tube equipment required constant care. And while tube amplifiers were very simple circuits they often operated erratically and needed to be pampered. As technology has allowed us to manufacture better quality equipment the level sophistication has gone up dramatically. Both mechanically and electrically today's equipment is extremely complex. The need for specialized schooling has only been enhanced by these changes. And let's not forget about management schools. Todays engineer is more than just a technical wizard. This holds especially true for Chief engineers and technical supervisors. We are expected to perform human tasks as well. The management of people is a science all on its own. It is not something that is purely instinctive, but rather, it is a learned experience. A poorly trained manager can disrupt your operation just as easily as a bad tuneup can destroy your cars engine. Your staff will work more efficiently if they are managed correctly. When all is said and done we have to weight the need for education and balance it against the cost our operations. Management schools can offer a great many things to your technical managers and staff. The broadcasting industry is a people driven business. Unlike some businesses, our product is not something that is stamped out by a cookie cutting machine. It is an on going process where people interact with man and machine. If we do not properly maintain the human side how can we possibly expect the mechanical to follow suit.