Do we need more Certified Professional Instructors?

While I was at NI Week I took the training to become a Certified Professional Instructor (CPI). I just found out that I passed. My hope is to teach NI classes here at the University of Michigan and at the local NI training center. In a recent exchange at the LAVA forums I made the claim that we need more CPIs, and that claim was met with some skepticism. Do we need more CPIs? Why do we need them at all?

In my previous post I pointed out that NI is not in the business of teaching. They do have a training center and they do make a profit from teaching, but providing teachers for every class held in every country is obviously outside their core business model. More importantly, the teachers provided by NI have been non-certified, though that might be changing since they are now allowed to pursue certification. But the question remains: will NI teachers be held to the same standards as CPIs?

CPIs must have at least a CLD to teach NI classes. Will NI require the same from their own employees? I speculated previously that we will see many CLAD certifications from NI employees but that the number of CLDs and CLAs will be much lower. Will NI have enough CLD employees willing to pursue CPI certification, especially since trainers usually move on to other areas of the company after their first two years? It remains to be seen. My guess is that there will not be a large enough pool of NI CPIs to handle the teaching load. NI will have to either generate enough home-grown CPIs every two years to teach all the classes offered throughout the world, or they will have to continue their current double-standard policy of certified outsider/non-certified insider instructors. And even if NI could somehow provide a steady stream of new in-house CPIs, those CPIs would have at most two years of experience.

This is why we need more active, practicing CPIs. Teaching classes is one way that we, the LabVIEW community, can help promote and expand the use of LabVIEW. With more practicing CPIs the pool of qualified, experienced teachers will grow, students will be better served, and NI engineers will be able to focus their efforts on producing quality hardware and software. It's a win-win situation.