After a several-month halt to in-person training because of the pandemic, I-CAR is back to offering in-shop training and welding certification in all but a couple of states, and conducted about 400 such events per month across the country this summer, according to CEO John Van Alstyne.
“Looking at September, we’re at about that same type of rate, and we have another 400 or so that are pending to be scheduled,” he said.
I-CAR has established requirements shops and instructors must abide by during such sessions. Students and instructors must wear masks, for example, and enough space must be available to allow for social distancing. Anyone not involved in the session must remain outside the area of the shop that is being used for the training.
Live classroom I-CAR training, however, has not resumed at the 500 fixed sites I-CAR uses.
“At this moment, we don’t have a clear plan of exactly when we’re going to restart the live courses,” Van Alstyne said. “A lot of those fixed training sites are schools, and schools have been a bit complicated, like many institutions, in terms of access. So we’re still at no live [classroom] training. We continue to monitor that, and we’ll be giving updates as soon as we we’re able to.”
He said the four live I-CAR courses required for Gold Class for now will continue to be offered virtually, taught live by an instructor but delivered online. Earlier this year, Van Alstyne those courses will convert back to in-person courses in classrooms or shops once I-CAR begins offering live courses again.
“Our curriculum was designed to be delivered in a certain manner to optimize the learning experience and conveyance of the [information],” Van Alstyne said. “We determined that the courses that were designed as live were best delivered as live. But our review [in response to the pandemic] was that some of those courses could be delivered virtually without any significant compromise in the learning objectives.
"That said, we didn’t convert every live class to virtual. And the ones we did, we do intend to take back to live.”
Van Alstyne also said its previously announced scaled-up requirements for earning or maintaining Gold Class status will kick in next year as scheduled.
John Yoswick