Donald Booth is the CEO and founder of the American Institute of Non-Destructive Testing. He will be giving a presentation at the Quality Show in April titled "The Evolution of NDT Education and Training."

And it seems, over the 100 years or however long we've been doing NDP training, a lot of it was provided inside the companies. And we've seen those trends changing to where level 3s are busy certifying people creating quality programs. So many other things that they don't have time to create curriculum that is really engaging and sticks to it. So they're outsourcing it a lot. And that's great for me, great for our company. And we're spending a lot of time just talking about that evolution of how training is changing.

Darryl: Okay, yeah, you mentioned a couple of things there, the online version of it, the time that people have to devote to it. But is there something about this subject that you felt made it ripe for a discussion right now?

Donald: I think with us growing so fast and we're watching this trend, and 14 months ago, when I founded the company, we did online training and then we came up with the online blended version where you could do, let's say 40 hours of level one ultrasound online, and then come to our facility for two days, so you're kind of getting the best of both worlds.

You get your online training, get a lot of the technology, a lot of terminology, and see video demonstrations, and then still have face-to-face with an instructor. Right, so blended was great. And we really, I mean, our blended NDT trainings really exploding. I think there's a few other companies that offered as well. But we also 14 months ago said, let's launch this traditional.

Again, let's get that old classroom out there. There's still some people that like it. We sell very little of it. It's people are moving away. It's very expensive to send people hotel costs and training costs. And now you send 10 people out and there's 10 rooms for the week while they're gone too. So I think the inflation over the last few years, companies looking to save money.

It's not so much educators trying to change the industry. It's the demand that we are reacting to, right? We're trying to solve pain points for our customers. So I think that's why, you know, it's a really good topic for right now. And with virtual reality, augmented reality coming forth, I think we're a long way off on VR because when you take non-aqueous wet developer and you're doing liquid penetrant and you develop a part and you watch that discontinuity form, it's, that tells you so much about the discontinuity. How deep is it? Is it a tight crack? Is it, what's the reservoir like? What's the shape? All of that is going to be hard to replicate in VR. Not impossible, but there's a lot of R and D and a lot of money that still needs to go into developing VR. So VR computer simulation, blended learning, online learning. Wow, a lot of changes have come to the industry. Sure. And I see that I see the rationale behind that you're basically trying to not dictate how the industry is handling training, you're trying to accommodate the way that training wants to or needs to be done. So I definitely see the rationale there.