"Apart From Education and Giving People Access to Professional Training, It's also about Bringing the Community Together and that's a Really Important Aspect in a Growing Industry"

-Wendy Griffiths, Vice President Global Development

Mumbai’s AV Consultants and Integrators congregated at CEDIA's Training & Tech Summit Event held from 7th to 9th August at the MCA Club in Bandra, Mumbai. AV-ICNx caught up with CEDIA members present at the event, studiously attending all tactical sessions. Smlta Ral caught up with Wendy Griffiths - Vice President Global Development for CEDIA, at the sidelines of the event to find out more about CEDIA's activities in India.

What is CEDIA's Primary Focus at this moment?

Establishing CEDIA as an entity outside of the two core countries of the UK and the US is the agenda. Wehave four focus countries for development within this strategy at the moment which is Australia, India, Canada and Mexico.

What do you think about India as a market?

It's amazing! It seems to be really buoyant. One of the things that September - October 2019 amaze me is what I learn from the peer group discussions that take place. Everyone here has an altruistic

wish to grow the industry and grow more efficiently. They are quite happy to work together with competitors to make that happen which is a great thing for me to see.

Smita Rai with Wendy Griffith at Cedia’s Training & Tech Summit Event held in Mumbai

How many members do you have in India?

50, as of March this year. We always dealt with India out of the UK office and from end of March this year we had Roopesh Shah come on board, so now we have a dedicated resource in India. I think he's going to make a huge difference. We've certainly seen a massive increase this year with sponsorship and with attendance for this event but also we've had six member companies renewing off the back of this event.

What Is the schedule for the ongoing Tech Summit?

We started the summit this week on Tuesday, 6th August, with what we call as the CEDIA Accredited

Presenter training. This was a training course for eight people who we have identified as subject matter experts. We took them through presentation skills training so they could become senior presenters for us and actually offer education for us on a regular basis. Up to now, we've been very dependent on international presenters and subject matter experts coming over, which is fine. We want to continue to do that, but we also want to have local subject matter experts who can actually offer education for

us on a regular basis. We want to get as many people trained as possible and get people through certification exams and get the core curriculum out to the Indian market

Yesterday, Wednesday, 7th August we held our Manufacturer Product Training Tech Summit So that was an event where we had an attendance of probably about 110 to 120 at the peak of the day. We had 10 sponsors and they did manufacturer product training. CEDIA had all the sponsors talk about their latest products.

I did a presentation on Working with Design Professionals like architects and interior designers. We had a gentleman from the IIID come over to understand more about what CEDIA does and how we can work with the IIID to raise awareness amongst Interior designers. We wrapped up the day with a networking event for everyone to get together.

Today (Thursday, 8th August) we are following up with the core curriculum. In the morning we had Project Management training for high performance Cinema Projects and in the afternoon we had Advanced Lighting Design training for Cinema Designers. In another room, we had the network training going on. We had Peter Aylett who is our international presenter doing the Project Management course and the lighting course and Rajeev Jain from Play Technologies who is our local presenter doing the network training for us. Tomorrow, we'll continue with more advanced networking training and an acoustics workshop.

How many events does CEDIA do in India in a year and how long have you been having these events here in India?

At the moment, we do our own standalone events, generally two in a year, but we're actually looking at a format for next year wherein we can do one big event and then a number of smaller satellite events to support that. We want to concentrate our efforts on one bigger event a year to get the industry together. It was commented last night that this is about the only time that the industry gets together and this is one of the core roles of CEDIA. Apart from education and giving people access to professional training, it's also about bringing the community together and that's a really important aspect in a growing industry.

We have been doing these events in India for five years now and it's been continuing to evolve. We have been managing this very much out of the UK. So we'd come to India and do the events and then unfortunately there was no continuity in between which is where Roopesh now comes in.

This is the first time that we have done a four-day event, however. Some people have been here for four days, which is amazing. To take time out their business to do be here is phenomenal. Also, this year we found that it's been very regionally inclusive. We've had a lot of people from Bangalore and Delhi too; basically from all over which is again great.

Your future plans for India?

There are a couple of focuses for us in India. One (and it started off pretty much yesterday) is the Working Professionals Designs course. We also want to really start developing what we call our SEO high CEDIA Outreach Instructor programme. We call it CEP over here - Continued Education Programme.

The programme enables members to develop relationships with interior designers and architects and gives CEDIA members a platform to get in front of these very valuable professionals and talk to them about what they can do and how they can enhance their client's lifestyles. The programme helps raise awareness of CEDIA, its members, and the home technology industry to design professionals.

That's a big part of what we want to do.

The other part is we really want to continue with the development of education and professionalism in the market. We push with certification exams and we have certification for technical design and networking. The focus for us going forward is getting people up to certified levels in those disciplines.

The other discussions we are having is on how we can educate people at that college and university levels and even maybe the school level about the opportunities available to have a career in this industry. We want to try to bring new people into the industry who want to build a career in this area.