When considering these opportunities, however, integrators “need to be mindful of how these line up with your core competencies,” Wilson says.
“When you address those and find out what those are, then you do your talent search. Do we have the right people to pursue the technologies that we want? Or do we have to acquire that talent? If you look at acquisition, what kind of investment are you willing to make? What revenue streams are going to be the logical bets for your company?”
One of these potential revenue streams — a sort of controversial one — is the potential for firms to set themselves up to provide the more repeatable, less custom, often lower-end and usually smaller-room solutions that clients increasingly request. Many view this as the dumbing down of the industry, although innovative integration firms looking to cater to that demand may take exception to that.
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The issue, however, isn’t about small versus large or custom versus cookie-cutter, explains InfoComm’s Labuskes. “There’s a temptation to compromise on quality that organizations that are having difficulties are finding hard to resist,” he says, adding that it’s a road to be traveled carefully. “The problem is like crack cocaine. You make that first compromise and it makes it easier for you to compromise the second time and the third time.”
It’s the first step “toward turning yourself into a commodity and a battle that you cannot win on price,” he continues. “Someone out there will have scale, will have lower quality personnel or lower cost personnel and they’re going to beat you on that. At the end of the day you will have to find the playing field one small compromise on quality at a time. So don’t compromise on quality.”
Emerging Challenge: Finding Talent
If integrators want to avoid compromising on quality as they grow their firms, they’ll need talented employees to grow with them. Finding that next generation of company and industry leaders has become a challenge.
“I think we have a serious industry problem that we all need to address,” said Rob Simopoulos of Scarborough, Maine-based Advance Technology in a recent CI Profile. “We are not attracting enough talented people into the industry. If you look at students specifically, there are no clear paths for them to follow in order to join the integration industry. I’ve spoken to a number of IT students at colleges in Canada and the U.S., and most of them have no idea that they can gain a career in the security or AV industry. The majority of them have tunnel vision toward the traditional IT space.”
It’s also a daunting problem, says PSNI’s Miller. The skillsets needed for technicians, system designers and programs to excel in AV integration are unique. “It’s not like you can just plug somebody in and teach them a skill that they can do for 10 hours a day. That creates an environment that is a different kind of employ.”
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That variable requires outside assistance; for instance, technical schools, community colleges and high schools weaving AV into their curriculum. That has always been a tough one, says Miller, a former InfoComm president who has experience pitching the AV integration industry to community colleges. “The first question they’d ask is, ‘So what’s the opportunity? How many people is your industry going to hire every year? That’s a problem for us,” he says of the elusive data.
InfoComm, however, is working on accumulating exactly that type of information, says Labuskes, who spent much of 2014 on the road talking to integrators about the organization’s strategic plan document of which “workforce development” is one of the six pillars of development.
“Part of what we had to do, which had not been done as an industry, is define it from a scale and scope of employment perspective, so there is a defined market of need when you talk to the curriculum developers at universities, technical schools and high schools.” At press time, Labuskes said, InfoComm is in the process of buttoning up that information. “We will have completed a job skills and evaluation of the size of the market and be ready to publish that shortly thereafter. That will help.”
