Ask the Programmer
Ask The Programmer Episode 250 - Guest Jamison Vandenberg Promotes AV Career Paths to Student Workers
25 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of episode 250 for the hosts?
From the world of AV programming and control with James King, I'm Steve Greenblatt, and this is Ask the Programmer. James, how are you today? We're actually at a milestone episode 250, so I'm pretty excited about it.
Well, we're halfway to 500. I'm doing good, Steve. And how about yourself?
Doing well. As we mentioned in our last episode, we're just coming off holiday break, so it's time to pause and recharge a bit and look toward a new year. So looking forward to that. And that's as we're recording. We've already talked about our New Year's stuff in a previous episode.
So in our last episode, we also were fortunate to be joined by Jameson Vandenberg, an academic specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He's back with us on this episode. If you didn't catch our last episode, 249, please do. But welcome back, Jameson.
Thank you so much for having me. And congratulations on 250.
Thanks so much. This is a little thing that James and I started out and said, let's see where it lands, and we're almost five years into it, so it's pretty exciting. But in our last episode, you really enlightened us with all of the ways that you have grown a passion for AV and how it started when you were young.
and how you've been able to be guided by different mentors and really, in a short amount of time, have really established yourself and built a lot of knowledge and skills. But really, the the drive to, to love AV and, and you, you've passed that on to some of the people that, um, your, your student, student workers and, and coworkers and so forth.
Can you talk a little bit more about that, about the process? Um, because that, it sounds like it's really something that maybe other schools can learn from and could, could be very valuable.
Yeah, most definitely. So we start a lot of the times where a lot of the students either they start at the service desk side of the house taking a lot of the calls or they start at the dispatch side of the house taking a lot of, you know, computer tickets, computer swaps. And they'll start seeing me kind of running around doing random stuff with a whole bunch of tools.
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Chapter 2: How does Jamison Vandenberg promote AV career paths to students?
Are you sending any of the students to get a CTS or learn from any of the manufacturer training that's out there?
Yeah.
So we do a lot of formal training. A lot of the time it is more free training than paid training because students, obviously, you're already paying an arm and a leg for college. And I don't want to take away too much of their money by saying, hey, let's go do a CTS because $500 to me might not be as bad, but $500 when I was a student, whoo. that was like my entire paycheck.
So it's, I don't want to do that. But like, at the same time, we, we work a lot with Extron. We work a lot with Q-SYS. I talked to a lot of my, you know, integrators of like, Hey, when you're on site, can you designate like one hour for your installers just to really give my students tips and tricks of just like what works for them? What did they do?
And it's, it's been a relationship building with all of my integrators and manufacturers. And I've just had a meeting with Planar to say, hey, if there's any training for how to install these direct view LEDs, can I and a student join for these trainings that integrators are getting? Because that's what we need to do.
Really fascinating and amazing progress. This is a conversation that I think more and more schools need to have and more of the industry needs to be aware of. James, what are your thoughts about how we could create more visibility around this?
Things like this podcast where we just have guests come in and speak about it. You know, what George Chaco is doing with next learning, next level learning is a great thing as well. Another way to get the word out. You got HEPMA. There is a lot of avenues out there to get the word out of what's going on, what schools are doing. And.
We got to understand this is something I I'm still learning as a leader, but also things I say to my student workers is my job is to educate you. You're here as a student to get an education, not just in the classroom, but also outside the classroom, you know, working for me. You're not it's not just a job. I'm I'm also here to educate you.
And that's when, you know, like James said, you just get them involved, bring them along. What are you going to do in this situation? What can you do here? Failure is a great learning tool. We all know Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan has a famous quote of, I missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and miss.
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Chapter 3: What hands-on training opportunities are offered to student workers?
I'm going to take these steps moving forward, you know, cracking a display. Cool. I now need to know to be careful, not grab it by this area, not twist it. You learn. Cool. Now, that's great. We learn. Yeah, we made a mistake. Could be $1,800 mistake. Could be five grand. But who knows? Sometimes those mistakes are costly.
I mean, I tell everyone, again, this is us as leaders, as full-time people, we also got to let people know that failure happens to everybody. I took down the AV network during orientation at school. And anyone who works in higher education knows orientation is a big deal. And yes, I took it down during orientation. Didn't mean to. I made a mistake. I learned from it. Trust me.
We all learn from it. But that was only down for a minute or two. And because we were in an environment that allowed people to make mistakes, I remember after that incident happened, we took care of it. We got them up and running. I remember talking to the person who was actually speaking on stage when the microphones cut out. I apologized to them. I was like, hey, I'm sorry about that.
And they looked at me and go, we knew you would have it covered. If we were anywhere else, we would have been upset. But we knew the school knew what they were doing. We made a mistake. Cool. We're up and running again. That's what I think shows having an environment where people trust you and allow you to make those mistakes.
that truly applies to business in general. I mean, you know, I think that you're, I think we talk about all the time that if you're not making mistakes, you're not growing. And there's, for people who don't allow themselves to take risk and take chances, they're really never going to go any further than what they're currently doing today.
In fact, they're probably going to shrink because they're going to be more and more fearful of doing something wrong and it almost freezes you. So I can relate to that in so many different ways. Jameson, I'm curious what percentage, and I don't know if you could tell or approximate this, of the student workers go on to either pursue an opportunity with your team or go into AV in general?
And is this something that... the industry can look toward, because I've always thought that, you know, student workers could really get interested in this if they stuck with it and did it enough. And like you said, there's careers out there that people could really get, you know, become passionate about.
Yeah, there's a lot of my students end up just going right into AV right out of college. So a lot of them, you know, they join me for all my vendor meetings. They'll join me for the scope of work. They'll join me for a lot of it. They get to meet, you know,
all the big names in the industry, I'm not going to name them all out, but like all the really big names in the industry, they even get to meet, you know, my reps for like Q-SYS or Extron so that they can actually like kind of see what they do so they can see the manufacturer side of it. So I would say like recently I've had two Michaels graduate.
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Chapter 4: How do students learn from their failures in AV training?
James, this is right up your alley. I know that you and I often talk about different ways to be able to manage more effectively, get more out of your day, be able to leverage your time. What are some of your thoughts?
I think Jameson nailed it on the head. It's definitely come down to time management. It comes down to that drive, prioritizing what's important, what's not, understanding that. And the only thing I would also add is, you know, the culture and the environment that allows things like that. You know, I've worked at two different universities, two different cultures.
I saw it, I worked at, I currently work at a small school. We had a, just to show you the culture and the people who understand what's going on and the time that people need is we had something that was very important for the students going on. While information didn't get relayed correctly or in a timely manner, so we had to set up something that usually takes us two or three hours to set up.
We had to set it up in 20 minutes. Because they were like, why isn't this set up? We got told, hey, we never got told about it. The whole building, and I seriously mean the whole building, came together and got the room set up. You had... People who were admins, you had people who were administrative assistants, you had everyone who was just like, what can I do to help?
Because they already said that the goal of the university was to educate the student. And that allows, you know, we could show them, hey, this is why we say it takes so long to do something. They saw how much work it takes. And now they don't question because I was cool all the time. It's like, well, why haven't you gotten to that? Well, hold on. I got a hundred tickets. I got to respond.
Which one do you want me to take care of first? Like we're only one person or we're only a small team. So having the culture that the people understand what's going on is valuable and allow you to have those downtimes. Will there be downtimes? Yes. Especially in higher ed. Not always. What most people think, like, you know, you look at corporate, you know, you have your ups and downs.
Higher ed is, yeah, we have our flows are up and down, but those flows change. As I always love when people say, oh, you work in higher ed, you must be really slow during the winter and summer. No, I'm busy. I go during the semester, we're break fix. During the winter and summer, we're project focused.
So that's really, yeah, we have our ups and downs, but we're still a steady work and finding those times, you know, allowing like, okay, maybe we only have a team of three. One person is focusing on training, while the other two is doing daily operations. And, you know, you share that knowledge among each other. Those were the only things I would add to what James and Ari added as well.
That's really great insight and great, great lessons learned. And I think it comes down to being able to understand the environment that you're in, the opportunities that you have, and the best way to work through it. to lean into the situation that you have and leverage it as best as possible. Jameson, before we let you go, anything else that you wanted to share with us, with our audience?
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