There is a lot more to working in AV than knowing how to make one piece of equipment work.
Networking, audio, video, control, programming, security, collaboration, user experience, and system design increasingly overlap. For someone starting a career in AV or higher education technology, figuring out where to begin can sometimes be the hardest part.
Matthew Pomeroy of Crestron offered fairly simple advice: “Work hard, learn as much as you can, and challenge yourself to learn all facets of the process.”
That idea of continually expanding what you know also shows up in the way Crestron approaches professional development across the AV industry.
Pomeroy pointed to training and education, along with Crestron’s support of organizations including HETMA, ETC, and AVIXA, when asked how the company invests in the next generation of AV and IT professionals.
Building Skills One Layer at a Time
For many AV professionals, one of the most visible examples is the Crestron Technical Institute (CTI).
CTI provides online and instructor-led learning that can take someone from introductory material into system configuration, programming, networking, AV-over-IP, collaboration, and more advanced design and development work. Crestron’s training catalog includes everything from introductory system courses to multi-day programming classes and specialized certification paths.
Those courses are understandably built around Crestron technology, but many of the underlying skills extend well beyond a single manufacturer. Understanding networks, troubleshooting complex systems, thinking through signal flow, programming logic, and designing systems that can scale are all skills AV professionals carry from one project to the next.
John Hulen, Crestron’s Vertical Marketing Director, sees that broader education as an important part of developing the industry’s workforce. He pointed to Crestron’s training not only around its own products, but also AV-over-IP, USB, collaboration, and other technologies AV professionals increasingly encounter.
That matters in higher ed, where the person supporting a classroom today may eventually find themselves programming control systems, managing AV-over-IP networks, designing standards, leading projects, or supervising an entire campus technology operation.
When Training Becomes a Community
For professionals who continue deeper into that path, Crestron Masters takes a different approach.
What began in 2002 as an intensive training event for a small group of programmers has grown into an annual continuing-education program for certified professionals. The 2026 program includes separate paths for programmers and technology architects, with courses in areas including programming methodologies, scalable system design, collaboration, AV-over-IP, intelligent video, networking, and other emerging technologies.
There is an important community piece to that.
Masters brings together programmers, designers, trainers, product teams, and other professionals who spend their careers solving many of the same problems in different environments. Some of the learning happens in the classes, but some happens when people compare approaches, share lessons from projects, and discover how somebody else solved the problem they are facing back home.
Crestron has continued expanding those pathways as the boundaries between AV and IT become less distinct. Its Modern Workplace certification, for example, was developed for AV and IT professionals, designers, consultants, and others working across control, conferencing, collaboration, and AV-over-IP.
Reaching the People Who Come Next
Developing the next generation also means creating opportunities before someone has an established AV career.
Crestron’s campus recruiting program includes internships and co-op opportunities across engineering, IT, software development, technical support, manufacturing, marketing, and other parts of the company. Participants receive hands-on work, mentoring, coaching, and technical training rather than simply observing from the sidelines.
Hulen sees organizations such as HETMA as another important part of that workforce pipeline, particularly through efforts that introduce student workers and newer AV technicians to the larger professional community.
“The idea that newcomers to the industry see an association that is really on the cutting edge,” Hulen said, helps build “what we need as an infrastructure of employee workforce development.”
Hulen is also personally involved with NextLVL, an organization founded by George Chacko of Pace University that works to introduce high school and college students to opportunities in AV.
That addresses a challenge the industry continues to face. Before someone can choose AV as a career, they first need to know that the career exists.
For Hulen, AV has a pretty good story to tell once those students discover it. The industry touches classrooms, collaboration spaces, entertainment, live events, residential environments, and plenty of places in between.
“We have one of the funnest industries to work for,” he said. “We get to see cutting-edge technology working, whether it’s from marinas or classrooms or whatever.”
More importantly, there are opportunities to grow once someone gets through the door.
Keep Expanding the Toolbox
There probably is not a point in an AV career where somebody gets to say they have learned everything they need to know.
The technology moves too quickly, and the job touches too many disciplines.
That may be why Pomeroy’s advice works so well as the takeaway: learn as much as you can, and challenge yourself to understand all facets of the process.
But the industry also has to make sure there are people coming behind today’s professionals who get the opportunity to start that process.
Through training and certification, internships and co-ops, outreach to younger students, and support for organizations such as HETMA, Crestron is contributing at both ends of that equation: helping experienced professionals continue learning while creating more opportunities for the next generation to discover AV in the first place.
