The learning never ends at TechComm Partners

PARTNERING UP: The TechComm Partners leadership team, from left: President and CEO Trudy Mandeville, TCP Learning Chief Operating Officer Barbara Jackson, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President Pat Crowshaw and Director of Instructional Technologies Karen Torres. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT
PARTNERING UP: The TechComm Partners leadership team, from left: President and CEO Trudy Mandeville, TCP Learning Chief Operating Officer Barbara Jackson, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President Pat Crowshaw and Director of Instructional Technologies Karen Torres. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT

Trudy Mandeville sees a better America through better training.
It’s a bold vision for the CEO and founder of a small, family business with six employees in Smithfield, but that’s how she sees it. The owner of TechComm Partners believes passionately in education and learning, and she thinks training can make the difference, literally, between triumph and tragedy, success and failure.
Her husband, Pat Crowshaw, is the company’s vice president and chief operating officer. He, too, believes training is a critically overlooked aspect in business today. “If you look at the military,” Crowshaw said, “99 percent of what they do is training.” Like his wife, he believes more businesses should invest in training for their employees.
Not surprisingly, training is what TechComm does best. TechComm’s expertise lies in the design of electronic training programs, most of them customized for individual clients. Examples include customer-service training, nursing education, technology training or health and safety programs.
Last fall, they signed a contract to design a professional-development program for the R.I. Department of Education, part of the state’s Race to the Top initiative. Teachers are helping design the program.
“When we talk about design, we’re talking about building the best way of presenting information,” Mandeville said. “We try to organize it in such a way that you can retain it. That may require video, animation, simple graphics, audio, a quiz, all of the above.”
Crowshaw added, “We organize the information, make it clear, make it concise, make sure it flows. Maybe we put in a quiz at the end. The beauty of this type of learning is that it allows you to easily go back anytime to review the materials.”
Though she has nearly 20 years of experience in the design of such programs, Mandeville tries to focus most of her energy on the strategic direction of the firm, while her husband manages day-to-day operations. Her stepdaughter, Karen Torres, is the company’s director of instructional technology, and her college-age grandson holds one of the jobs she is most proud of – apprentice. After TechComm moved from Mandeville’s and Croshaw’s kitchen to a commercial office not far from Bryant University four years ago, the owners launched an intern/apprentice program for high school and college students. All the students receive either classroom credits or salaries, and they contribute to the core competencies of the firm. The right students are technically savvy, ideally with strong PowerPoint skills, and they do the work of industrial technologists – actually designing client-training programs.
Mandeville is thrilled with the apprentice program and its potential to build a better company, even a better American work force.
“Our true competition in this space is offshore. So we believe that by building this nontraditional, instructional model for apprentices, we can help our business grow, and even though they’ll leave us at some point, we’ll help to build a work force that’s skilled, that can compete with offshore,” Mandeville said.
While the core business for TechComm Partners is customized training programs, the firm offers ancillary services. They are a testing center for partners like Pearson and the U.S. Postal Service. They average 150 to 200 tests per month. They are also partners with the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, offering career-development courses for out-of-work Rhode Islanders.
Though both roles produce only limited revenue streams, they help the small firm with marketing and credibility.
The owners are optimistic that the boom in “e-learning” across the country is a good thing for their firm. Either way, Mandeville is committed to doing what she does.
“A lot of my friends are retiring, but I’m not even thinking about it,” she said. &#8226

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