NSCA’s Ignite Program Is Antidote for Industry That Can’t Market Itself

NSCA officially launches its Ignite recruitment program at its 2016 Business & Leadership Conference.

Tom LeBlanc

NSCA’s Ignite program, which aims to build awareness of career opportunities in the integration industry and alleviate recruiting challenges for integration firms and consultants, officially kicked off at the 18th annual Business & Leadership Conference.

The program aims to chip away at the industry’s awareness issue by providing integration firms and consultants with marketing fodder and promotional materials to use at job fairs and any opportunity in which they can get in front of young students or professionals who might be talent candidates for the industry.

In effect, Ignite empowers companies to raise awareness of the industry and turns them into feet on the ground in the battle to raise awareness of the integration industry.

NSCA’s three-person Ignite committee – AVI Systems’ Kelly Perkins, IMS Technology Services’ Michael Shinn and Chief and Milestone’s Laurie Englert – took the stage at BLC to official launch the program.

“We work in a very cool industry,” Perkins told a crowd of 380 BLC attendees. “Unfortunately it’s perceived as outdated and irrelevant but it’s not.” The problem, she added, is “we suck at marketing ourselves.”

Related: Plight of an Invisible Industry—Battle to Recruit Students Who Don’t Know AV

NSCA’s Ignite program will create marketing content for integrators to bring to young students and candidates.

“We’ll give you all the tools you will need to target career and technology administrators,” said Englert, adding that the program will target STEM administrators “like there’s no tomorrow.”

The Ignite committee, which has been interviewing high school and college administrators for several months leading up to the launch of the program, hopes to take the helplessness out of recruiting. Integration firms have long bemoaned the lack of outreach by trade organizations. Ignite is designed to leverage the volume of those integration firms across North America by providing tools to help them effectively reach out on a local level and raise awareness.

“We need people like you to step up and go out and recruit,” Shinn told BLC attendees.

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