Reading Thom’s article in last month’s issue, “JobLine Turns 30!”, brought back many great memories of the times I have worked with him. I’ve known Thom for over 25 years and worked with him numerous times, with one of our best projects being the training business we created.
My first contact with Thom was as a job seeker. Too much time has passed to be certain, but I believe I found him through an ad in Don Carlson’s Automated Builder magazine. Thom went through his normal routine with new candidates and arranged for me to interview with a couple of companies. One company offered me a job which I declined, and the other had placed a freeze on hiring non-U.S. citizens which excluded me.
While working to find me a good job match, Thom also started to talk about the shortage of designers available in the industry and what he saw as a need to create new designers. Thom would be the first to tell you that he is not a truss designer, but he saw a need. He suggested to me that someone (i.e., Thom and I) should create a training program where students would come for four weeks of training to become truss designers. I hope I was polite enough not to laugh when he first suggested it, but I know that my initial reaction was that there was no way you could “create” a truss designer in four weeks.
As we continued to talk, I started to change my expectation of what the program might look like. Ultimately, my objective became not to try to make a truss designer, but to give someone sufficient blueprint reading and software skills along with an understanding of the basic math and geometry behind it. The goal, as we would later describe it to potential clients, was to produce an employee that could “Recognize when they needed help, ask an intelligent question, and understand a reasonable explanation.”
We eventually set up a temporary classroom in a St. Louis area hotel conference room in the summer of 1997, moving later that year to a more permanent location in St. Charles, MO. The training business was initially called Component Systems Institute (CSI), later Component Design Center (CDC). We started by offering training using MiTek software, and soon after we added Alpine as well. A few years later, we included TrusWal software too. Many times, we would have some students in a class learning MiTek software while others in the same class were learning Alpine or TrusWal. This meant that, as the instructor, I was constantly using two programs simultaneously. It’s been many years, but I still remember the headaches at the end of those days of bouncing back and forth between programs. Both students and their employers confirmed that graduates of the program quickly became productive designers, much faster than those who did not have any similar training. Recently, we’ve had some interest in reviving the training program, perhaps as an online offering. If this is something that you or your company would like to see, please contact either Thom or I and we can talk about how it might work.
From the years that CSI/CDC was in operation, I’m proud to know that we helped people get their start in the truss business. In fact, many of the students have contacted me over the years since. We had students come to us from Florida to Alaska, Arkansas to Maine, and across Canada. And now with the internet, who knows what could be possible next. If you are a past student or a potential student, please reach out, I’d love to hear from you.