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Digital signage industry sees push for customer, vendor education

Digital signage industry experts, distributors and associations are ramping up education efforts.

September 30, 2010 by Bill Yackey — Manager, West IP Communications

When it comes to digital signage, it seems there are three types of people: those who know everything (or just about everything), those who think they know everything, and those who know nothing. Fortunately for the latter two groups, members of the former group are making a push to improve the educational opportunities that members of the industry have.

The push has been a long time coming. For years, tradeshows and conferences have hosted educational sessions, but they only occurred a couple times a year and were usually informative but unstructured. When the DSF was created earlier this year, one of its vows was to improve the educational landscape in the industry, and the DSA also made similar promises during its restructuring.

We’re starting to see some of the effects of that now. The charge is being mainly led by the associations, as well as by two of the industry’s foremost educators, Lyle Bunn and Alan Brawn.

In the coming months, we will see several instances of this push for education, beginning with news this month that Black Box Network Services has launched a Digital Signage Certification Program. The program was designed with assistance from Alan Brawn of Brawn Consulting, but should not be confused with his firm’s Digital Signage Certified Expert Training. The program is designed specifically for system integrators and reseller partners, a crowd that will surely benefit from further education in digital signage. You can find more details about the DS Certified Expert Course here.

Because of systems integrators’ existing technology contracts, they have a foot in the door to upsell their existing clients on digital signage and the potential to significantly grow the digital signage installed base. See what Lyle Bunn had to say about this opportunity on the Digital Screenmedia Association blog.

According to Steve Acquista, director of digital signage for Black Box, the certification program is free, but only available for pre-approved systems integrator and reseller partners of Black Box. It will also earn systems integrators four renewal (CEU) credits toward their InfoComm Certified Technology Specialist (CTS) certification.

As part of the DSF’s promised educational push, they will be producing a webinar free for non-members and members alike by Lyle Bunn called “Advancing the Digital Signage Project” on October 20 at 2 p.m. EST. This is the second installment in a webinar series on digital signage projects that the DSF has put on.

Bunn is an active member of both the DSA and the DSF and specializes in consulting both digital signage vendors and deployers on planning, execution and project management.

As someone with his foot in both camps, Bunn is also backing his SPEED digital signage training program, which is now available on-demand online from the Digital Screenmedia Association for the first time. Traditionally, this training session coincided with industry tradeshows and was offered in a four-hour session. Bunn is following in the footsteps of Brawn, who began allowing his Digital Signage Expert Certification program to be taken online about a year ago.

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