Next Year in …

Next year in… not Jerusalem, but in 16 cities around North America for free PROFINET one-day training classes. This will be the first place you see our plans for 2014:

These are all PROFINET classes. We will not be conducting any PROFIBUS one-day training classes in 2014. There are plenty of other folks offering PROFIBUS classes and we have lots of online resources for PROFIBUS training. (See our technology page, documents, and webinars.)

But PROFINET is still new enough that we’ll continue the PROFINET one-day training classes. It’s too early to sign up for these classes because the dates could change and we’re still finalizing venues. So subscribe to and watch PROFInews North American Edition for announcements.

That’s the end of the news section; what follows is a look behind the scenes.

We are often asked how the cities and dates are chosen. It’s art and science. We look at past performance in cities; we have lots of history since we’ve been doing these for 12 years. We look at concentrations of industry. We listen to requests from members. We try to blanket the country geographically. And, yes, we choose dates based on the climate – warmer climates in colder months. We use a complex digital system in which we hand write digits on a white board, hand circle dates on a calendar, and make dots on a map:

This is when we discover that we tried to schedule a class during another event like our own General Assembly Meeting. And we discover that a couple dots on the map are too close together, so one dot has to move to the following year.

At any rate, we hope to see you in one of these cities in 2014 with a new curriculum based on all those Course Evaluations that students have filled out.

–Carl Henning