Showing posts with label Smart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smart. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Atia Training - Be A Smart And Sound Technical Assistant

Have you any time called any technical support call center for getting your computer corrected? If so how about the response you got from the technical support agent who warmly greeted and attended your call? Were you really satisfied with the response and the solutions you got through the call or were there any gap that must be filled to get better solution or remedies to the problem? Most of them are answering to this question in a very doubtful manner regarding the level of satisfaction that can be got out of the process. It is true that most of the technical agents are recruited without actually testing their knowledge on the recruited process and about their actual previous skills. This can be considered as the serious issues as most of the non technical people in the world require strong help from those technical people in order to move normally in their way without many troubles with the help of their electronic gadgets.

Also the people recruited to the post of the technical support staffs must have some botheration on the skills they are possessing and must find some alternate ways by which they can definitely go ahead with great improvements in their skill set. There are many programs available online that are actually provided with the aim of helping people to get more knowledge on any respective field without costing much. There are many people who are actually very fond of learning many new things in order to shape up their career to the most secure platform. There are many certification test conducted by various educational bodies in both the technical and non technical fields in order to help the person to be confident on certain sectors of their career. It must be made compulsory that all those aspiring to make a career on the technical field must get through the certification exam so that they can serve the clients with the greatest hospitality. You can search on internet to find many such certification examinations that cover various topics like hardware, software, networking, security, operating systems, and laptops and so on. You should definitely take an initiative to enroll in at least one certification test to get through at the highest score so that you can really shine in your profession with good promotional grades.

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Article Submitted On: November 09, 2010


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Monday, January 17, 2011

Utilities Seek Fresh Talent for Smart Grids

“He’d be amazed,” offered one student, mentioning that his cellphone can play music, display movies and send text messages.

And if Thomas Edison, the pioneer of power distribution, were to return?

“He’d probably go, ‘Wow, everything is still the same,’?” said Ms. Magnuson, the director of marketing for Silver Spring Networks, which produces hardware and software to make the electric grid as smart as the phone network.

To pull off the modernization, Ms. Magnuson and others are trying to persuade this generation of fidgety teenagers to put their creativity to work in the power industry once they graduate. “We want to help make utilities cool again,” she said.

The power companies desperately need a jolt of youthful energy. The industry and the creaky distribution system it manages are on the cusp of a major technological overhaul just as about half of electric utility employees are expected to retire in the next 5 to 10 years.

At the same time, the federal government and utilities are spending billions of dollars to upgrade the electric grid with intelligent digital technology so they can vary a customer’s price for power based on the time of day and more seamlessly integrate electricity from a variety of sources like wind and solar.

The upgrade would give the power generation and distribution network the sort of nervous system it has lacked since Edison first conceived it in the late 19th century. By some estimates, the smart grid could help reduce electricity use by more than 4 percent a year by 2030 and save $20 billion a year for utilities and their customers.

To push along the transformation, educators and government officials, often in partnership with utilities, are drawing up smart grid curriculums for elementary classrooms, vocational schools and university laboratories. In addition to educating youngsters about electricity, the goal is to lure some of the technologically inclined away from Silicon Valley and toward a profession that, in the popular mind, long ago became the province of Homer Simpson drones.

Last spring, the energy secretary, Steven Chu, awarded $100 million in stimulus money to 54 training programs in the smart grid aimed at high school and college students around the country. “Building and operating smart grid infrastructure will put tens of thousands of Americans to work,” Mr. Chu said at the time. “Today’s investment will help ensure that we have the work force in place to meet this need.”

The Energy Department estimated that some 30,000 workers would be trained because of the grants, which range from $87,000 for the Preparing Occupations for Lineman Education, or Pole, program at the Austin Community College District to $5 million to Florida Power & Light to develop its Gateway to Power Program, which aims to bring industry and academia together to develop power system and smart grid education.

And just as Reddy Kilowatt, a cartoon character created by a utility company, was used to promote the benefits of nuclear power to previous generations of students, the electric industry aims to use the new curriculums to promote its vision of the future.

“How will the smart grid change your life or your future career?” students are asked in one of the six lessons that Silver Spring Networks, based in California, helped to develop, and which were part of a pilot program this month in Ohio and in Oakland, Calif. “Write a journal entry in which you imagine how life or work will change after the smart grid is ready to go.”

Part of the coursework is aimed at preparing young consumers for the arrival of dynamic pricing — the ability to vary the price of electricity throughout the day, based on overall demand, rather than charge one rate all day, as is the norm now. Dynamic pricing is an oft-promoted benefit of the smart grid, although it has proved contentious in some of the early markets where it has been proposed, particularly among ratepayers at home during the day, when the electricity cost is higher.

Here in central Ohio, American Electric Power, the big regional utility, was awarded $75 million in stimulus money last year for a $150 million smart-grid pilot project now in development.


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