Picking PROFINET Cities

PI North America chooses 16 or 17 cities around the continent for each year’s free PROFINET one-day training classes.  Here is our formerly top secret selection methodology:

Never on a Monday… or Friday.  Students face an uncertain start of their week so we avoid Mondays.  Fridays are the days engineers scramble to finish tasks for the week so no Fridays for classes either.

Cold months – Southern cities.  Not because we are warm-blooded Arizonans who can’t handle cold weather… well, ok, that is why.  No, we are all originally from colder, northern climes so we know winter weather can interfere with students’ ability to get to class.  Sometimes we get surprised though, like the time it snowed in Atlanta in the spring.

Never the same city two years in a row.  Unless the city is Detroit or Houston.  Those two cities draw huge crowds every year.  Other large cities we schedule every other year.  Smaller cities every three or four years.  And sometimes we try somewhere we’ve never been – Spokane, Albuquerque, Omaha, and this year Oklahoma City.  Lesson learned: we have not been back to Spokane, Albuquerque, or Omaha.

Alternating regional cities.  For some regions, we’ll alternate city pairs.  Like if we do Cleveland one year we’ll do Pittsburgh the next.  Similarly, Portland, OR and Seattle, WA.

For 2016, these cities have been selected (hyperlinked cities are open for registration the rest are in the process of being scheduled):

CITY	2016 DATE (CALENDAR WEEK)
San Diego, CA	Feb 2
New Orleans, LA	Feb 18
Silicon Valley, CA	Mar 1
Kansas City, MO	Mar 15
Greenville, SC	Mar 29
Oklahoma City, OK	Apr 12
Portland, OR	Apr 26
Philadelphia, PA	May 10
Milwaukee, WI	Jun 22
Cincinnati, OH	Wk 24
Cleveland, OH	Wk 35
Boston, MA	Wk 41
Nashville, TN	Wk 43
Houston, TX	Wk 45
Detroit, MI	Wk 47
Jacksonville, FL	Wk 49

And Montreal, date TBD.

We hope to see you in one of these cities.

–Carl Henning