Our homes are full of digital gadgets and are beefing up on IQ, but is the education and training of home professionals keeping pace? Steve Freeth goes looking for some answers.

Casey Barrett, 23, recently finished a three-year electrical apprenticeship at TAFE while working for Sydney-based installer, Home Control & Audio.

His day job exposed him constantly to things like home intelligence, automation, fast broadband and digital entertainment, but for Casey it often seemed a long way from what he was learning in school.

“I got really very little experience with any smart home technologies during the course and I even felt discouraged by the teachers when I asked about it,” he says.

“Obviously I had a big interest in the area, but it wasn’t always shared by teachers or other students either, and that seemed strange.”

Luckily for Casey, Home Control & Audio provided a platform for him to complete further training, but for a lot of newly certified electricians, most would be “stuffed trying to deal with a lot of this.”

Casey’s experience seems fairly typical for a lot of young people with an interest in working in the smart, or even green, home sector. He did a telecommunications module in his course, but “the practical was completed on an analogue phone.”

A lot of companies operating in the home automation sector share Casey’s sentiment; There’s some concern across the industry that trainee electricians aren’t getting the high-tech exposure they need, or that clear educational and training paths simply aren’t obvious, or present.

Perth-based Surround Sounds director Mark Jeisman says it’s often difficult to attract junior workers with a good knowledge of and experience in the area, and that he’s often had to rely on job seekers from overseas to fill positions.

“We often work with electrical contractors on jobs, or have juniors on staff here, and my impression is that the smart home content in apprenticeship courses is still pretty much non-existent,” Mark says.

“It seems to be a case of motivation on the part of the individual worker, and a lot of learning on the job.”

Melbourne-based Cableman executive director Anthony Elbaum agrees.

“There’s a real mix of knowledge and skills that electricians and apprentices come with,” he says.

“Nothing beats hands on learning, but looking for outside courses can be frustrating, time consuming and expensive.”

But things are beginning to change.

As is the case with most technologies, it’s more a case of evolution, rather than revolution. And that’s clearly the case for trainee electricians.

All national training in the electrical trades – from distribution to electrotechnology – is set by a skills council, which in this case is EE-OZ. The formal training packages, which set competencies and Standards, are then put in to practice by a whole range of registered training organisations (RTOs), both public and private, and most notably the country-wide TAFE network.

According to EE-OZ’s industry specialist Ian Neeson, courses are changing all the time and are not immune to the digital revolution happening in commercial and domestic buildings. But core knowledge still has to be the priority.

“We still have to produce competent, safe electricians, but there’s always pressure on courses to pick up new technologies. Selecting which ones is the issue,” he says.

“At this stage, some smart home skills are being taught as electives, and I know that things like C-Bus and structured cabling have proven very popular modules in courses.

“I suspect, however, that this will become a more specialised area and may even become a more unified stream at some point.”

You don’t have to look much further than the individual TAFE to see that process underway. For the head teacher of the electrical trades at Granville TAFE in Sydney, Ian Paxton, courses are starting to reflect the technology impact, which is one of the reasons why they will be the first college in Australia to start offering the Smart Wiring accreditation.

“An electrical apprentice can only do a finite number of electives and a lot of what they do has to be dictated by what they are doing in the field,” Ian says.

“A lot of the smart home type technologies and skills are really post-trade at this stage, and I suspect that that is probably where they’ll remain.”

Courses, Courses Everywhere

Post-trade or not, it’s clear that the broader RTO and non-RTO educational scene is getting more active, even if a lot of the courses are often short, don’t always count toward a formal qualification or certification, and may not link clearly to each other.

For a start there’s now a whole range of product and vendor courses out there to choose from and many are getting quite sophisticated. Clipsal’s various modules, for example, have progressively built in more rigorous assessment and even course accreditation.

The Australian Communication & Media Authority (ACMA) is also in on the act, endorsing a number of more generalised courses, like the ACMA Open Registration, that not only blend electrical and communication skills but help to promote national Standards and certification.

At the same time CEDIA already has well-developed, short installation and design accreditation courses on offer, but is clearly looking at broadening their educational role and even becoming a RTO.

According to Sean Fields, who recently came onboard as CEDIA’s first local education manager, the smart home industry needs to be establishing clear cut pathways for certification.

“In many ways we are facing all the demands and problems of any new industry and we do need to be looking to provide both general and specialised training options for people,” he says.

“But it won’t be easy as we’re dealing with a whole range of people, from those with electrical qualifications to those from a technology background, as well as all the people who have been doing the work, but might want to now start their own company.”

The Copper Development Centre, working as part of the Smart Wiring Consortium, with a broad range of home installation partners, has also been steadily developing accreditation for its cabling standard for home data, automation, video and audio. While the Granville TAFE is the first to offer the course directly, negotiations are underway already with a Victorian college, as well as plans to provide the training online.

Reading, Writing & Regulations

No one is denying that there aren’t plenty of opportunities in the smart home market for people with the right skills, despite the fact that it still hasn’t quite lived up to earlier predictions of spectacular growth.

But the next few years should help. Faster broadband at the door will be a major driver for developers and home owners to look at home technology, while much higher data requirements for things like HD movie and audio downloads, video teleconferencing and home energy management will also give it some new urgency.

And of course the new technologies like 3D will just keep coming, continually challenging government and the smart home industry to create clear and national educational standards that meet the needs of this rapidly changing sector.

But getting some consensus on what is needed could take some time. Should this type of training, accreditation and certification remain at a post trade level or should it start earlier and be open to a broader range of people?
“Our members are telling us that they want more qualified staff, but that doesn’t necessarily mean electrical apprentices,” Bill McKenzie, CEDIA president and owner of Home Theatrix, says.

“Some electricians are interested in this area, but a lot aren’t and my feeling is that in the future we’ll get more people entering who have that technology, home entertainment or IT background.”

“I’d like to see more of a 2 year traineeship in the smart home sector that has TAFE backing to give the theory, but lets young people work in the field as well,” Bill added.

Certainly the number of courses out there today can be confusing, not to mention costly for small companies to cover in terms of fees or time off work. More seriously they also fail to really build to a formal qualification pathway or even a skill set that the public can recognize and rely on.

For Ian Millner, formerly the CEO of a private RTO and now a consultant to the Smart Wiring™ Consortium, the smart home industry is fast reaching a stage when there needs to be debate about these issues.

“We have training and certification for electricians, communication cablers, digital antennas and to a lesser degree, security, but homes need to be cabled for a lot more than that now,” Ian said.

“It’s obviously a matter of industry maturity, but I would like to see the smart home sector get its own formal training package.”

“How it’s then delivered would still need to be worked out, but it would at least mean we have clarified just what the competencies are and what needs to be included,” Ian said.

“Unfortunately that debate is not being had.”