Wim, You got it kind of right. These classes are put on by the manufacturers because that's where the money is AND because health care workers are required by government to keep a current certification involving continuing education. If the company wants their products sold, they either provide the training or sponsor organizations that do (i.e. pharmaceutical dollars heavily funding medical schools) In the end, the consumer/insurance companies are the ones paying for the training because the cost is built into the product. Israel talked about "finding the funding". In our world, this is essentially where it would have to come from as well. It's not going to come from colleges, and as Susan pointed out, it's going to be incredibly difficult to expect technicians to foot the bill for expensive continuing education. Because government does not require piano tuners to hold certifications, unfortunately, piano manufacturers are much more interested in compensating a sales force than in investing money to make sure their product is properly maintained by insisting on any kind of company sponsored training for technicians like almost every other industry does. In fact, product service funding comes completely out of the pockets of the sales force. And that goes for all of them. This goes back to what I talked about a few months back about manufacturers bearing some responsibility for their own continued reputation. Ideally, some sort of partnership between PTG and the piano manufacturers is what I was trying to suggest a while back, where PTG served the same function as Diane's organization. PTG would have to be the instigator and coordinator, and in some cases persuader of manufacturer training. If there is still a Piano Manufacturer's Association (the one which supposedly published the little blue pamphlet on piano care) might be a place to start. But what Israel is saying is what I've been trying to say for a long time. PTG certification will never have credibility until it starts acknowledging and incorporating training venues from outside its supervision. In fact, PTG could be a much more effective organization if it spent more effort working with manufacturers to encourage manufacturer sponsored training, than simply certifying members based on training materials published by PTG. The whole industry would benefit. Jeff --- On Thu, 7/29/10, tnrwim at aol.com <tnrwim at aol.com> wrote: From: tnrwim at aol.com <tnrwim at aol.com> Subject: Re: [CAUT] Retesting (Diane) To: caut at ptg.org Date: Thursday, July 29, 2010, 3:43 AM The audiology online courses are put on by hearing aid manufacturers, testing equipment manufacturers, assistive listening device manufacturers, suppliers, battery manufacturers, consultants, individuals who are interested in research in particular areas, the list goes on and on. All these companies sponsor these clinics because they know audiologist, etc, use equipment and will recommend patients to them. And there are literally millions and millions of patients needing hearing aids, etc. How many piano technicians sell pianos, or at most recommend new pianos to their customers? New pianos sales right now are less than 300,000 per year, world wide. BTW, how many members belong to your organization? Wim -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100729/8de99f48/attachment.htm>
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