FIST system is a system for teachign how to fit people on their bikes. The FIST certification siginifies that they are able to a person using this system.
question: do people fail your course? or can their certification be stripped? I know that you could have the most perfect teaching system but you are eventually going to be limited by the practitioner (same thing goes for medicine too) how do you forsee protecting this in the future? are you able to/willing to strip a certification? Is the certification for a store or is for a single person? I would imagine that from your atendees, you already had a bunch od people who were more than compotent to work with your system… what are you going to do with people who just plain don’t get it… or can’t do it?
What if the person who was certified moves stores… does the former lose theri certification and the new one gets it?
Just curious about the future of FIST liscencing and how you plan on protecting your “product” I put this in quotation becuase the product may be the information but in reality your product does not work if there is not an intermediary.
These are excellent questions and were addressed at F.I.S.T. but are more appropriate for Dan to answer. As you all know, I found it a very valuable learning experience.
nobody fails the test. or to put it another way, nobody fails to get certified. the test is just to get you to think about what it is you’ve absorbed. i’m not concerned about people leaving here unable to perform the fit properly. i don’t anticipate that being an issue.
certification cannot be stripped from the person who has taken the course. the certification says that a person knows how to properly fit someone according to FIST procedures. what CAN and WILL occur, however, is that my published database will reflect how bike fits are administered by the shop. so, if someone is FIST certified and it is clear this person isn’t fitting people according to FIST principles, then Slowtwitch will announce this fact to whomever accesses this on our site (see Dealer Profiles).
it is the person, not the store, who is FIST certified. there will be exceptions that occur on a temporary basis. as an example, clint page at wheelworks in belmont, mass, is very proactive about having his people properly certified in just about everything, serotta, FIST, etc. thom norton from that store just came through the latest FIST workshop. if thom were to leave wheelworks, i’d contact clint and we’d work out how we’d get his shop back to having FIST-trained people on his floor, and we’d do this without the FIST icon never leaving the wheelworks store. other shops i might not feel so confident in if a FIST-certified employee left. so it’ll get worked out on a case by case basis. in reality what appears to be the case is that most shops that ARE sending people to FIST are either sending multiple people out, or the owner(s) are coming out.
Taku walks into a bar. bartender says, “hey, let me tell you a couple of other bar jokes. your sig is ready to be updated.”