11/28/2000 -- Last week, Lawrence, PA-based Black Box Corp., an network services and product vendor, launched a new internal training and certification program for the company's 1,700 field service technicians.

The Master Technician certification program, which took Black Box around nine months to develop, consists of a week-long training course plus a written exam. Don Kincart, vice president of operations for Black Box Cincinnati, estimates that several hundred employees will participate in the program over the next year.

The Master Technician program is open to all Black Box technicians who have completed the third-level of BICSI certification (http://www.bicsi.com) -- an independent telecommunications organization which offers three tiers of cable installation certification. According to Kincart, the company's internal training and certification program builds on what the BICSI certification teaches, giving more in-depth instruction on topics like low-level network design considerations, estimating and customer service skills, as well as supervision skills. The training also covers Black Box-specific support resources.

"The BICSI is a very, very good program," said Kincart. "We wanted to add to that. [We started the program] to differentiate ourselves from the competition, to offer a higher level of service, more added value to our customers."

"The BICSI itself requires five years of experience, so it's a pretty big prerequisite," Kincart continued. "Eventually, our goal is to have every technician certified...but [given the experience requirement of the BICSI] it's more true to expect about half of our workforce to hold the certification at any time."

Black Box does have previous experience with executing a training and certification program-- it's an authorized training provider for the BICSI cert.

For more information on Black Box, please visit http://www.blackbox.com. -B.N.