This article was originally published by RFID Update.
June 16, 2005—There have been two announcements in the last week related to corporate involvement in RFID education. The first comes from DeVry University, the Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, technical training institution, and the RFID Technical Institute (RTI) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a provider of RFID educational products and services. Together they will offer RFID education and training through DeVry’s Center for Corporate Education. State approval pending, day and evening courses will be available at locations in Arlington, Virginia, and North Brunswick, New Jersey. The first offering will be a 30-hour course on the basics of RFID; the introduction of more advanced and vertically-focused choices is planned for the future. DeVry University president John Skubiak said in a statement that the new coursework partnership with RTI was “is in response to the increasing adoption of RFID in almost every business sector.”
The other news came out of Arkansas, where RFID solutions provider RFID Global Solution (RFIDGS) has officially become a corporate sponsor of the University of Arkansas RFID Research Center located at the Sam M. Walton College of Business. RFIDGS, which operates a nearby innovation center in Rogers, Arkansas, has provided the research center with RFID-related hardware, expertise, and software, including the company’s Global View product. It joins a list of other companies that have also sponsored the center, including names like Wal-Mart, Intel, Microsoft, and Tyson Foods.
The trend of companies working with educational institutions on their RFID programs is to be expected. With RFID having gone in a few short years from a decades-old, also-ran technology to one of the decade’s fastest-moving,
there is a worldwide shortage of RFID expertise. The industry is eager to get more people educated, trained, and working so that growth isn’t stunted, and academic institutions are looking to industry as their primary source of knowledge around which to produce curricula. Expect the academic-corporate partnerships to continue as overall RFID education efforts expand beyond what has been led by multi-day training programs and a few courses at key Midwestern universities.
