Podcast: 25 years of Compressed Air Challenge and the future of industrial training

Key takeaways

• Apply adult learning methods to boost retention and on-the-job results.
• Train operators to spot waste in compressed air systems for long-term savings.
• Tackle reliability first—efficiency improvements often follow naturally.
• Use remote and in-person training options to strengthen workforce skills.

In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Thomas Wilk and Maya Schwartz are joined by Ron Marshall, Frank Moskowitz, and Joe Ghislain to reflect on 25 years of the Compressed Air Challenge. The conversation explores the program’s origins, its evolution in training methods, and its impact on system performance and energy efficiency. The group also discusses shifting industry priorities, the role of end users and vendors in training, and how new technologies are shaping the future of compressed air systems. Together, they provide insights into both the history and the next chapter of this influential industry initiative.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

The early days of Compressed Air Challenge

Thomas Wilk: For those new to Compressed Air Challenge, it’s an educational foundation administered by the Compressed Air and Gas Institute. Specifically, it’s a voluntary collaboration of industry professionals whose purpose is to help facilities enjoy the benefits of improved compressed air system performance. Joe, since you were there from nearly the inception, tell us about the early days. How did the CAC group come together? What was the mission at the start?

Joe Ghislain: So the CAC started back in the late 90s—1996, 1997 timeframe. What it was, was the Department of Energy had just completed a successful program in the ‘90s called the Motor Challenge. Out of that came a lot of information and data on motors, and what they drove, and the energy they used. From that, it became clear that compressed air was one of the largest users of electricity in industry.

So it was something of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE), and at the time a lot of stakeholders joined together to form this group. The mission actually had two parts. First, in the late ‘90s, everybody was worried about jobs going away and making sure industry was more efficient. Reduction of energy of course was a big part for the DOE.

The big focus was the end user, going through and educating the end user. They had gotten together for the first meeting in Itasca, IL, and they were talking about the end users, and they looked around and said “wait a minute—we don’t have any end-user representatives.” So they went out to industry, interviewed, and took applications from a number of people in industry. I was selected to join CAC at that time on the Project Development Committee, to start developing our training and offerings.

It was the DOE, CAGI was part of it as well, and we had people from consulting, energy-efficiency organizations like the Iowa Energy Center and Wisconsin Energy Center. At that time, we even had some of the state commissions, like Illinois’ Commerce Commission and Energy Commission was part of it, and Ohio at the time.

The mission was to educate end users and make them more knowledgeable. Because at the time, like any industry, everybody would come along selling something, and their widget was always “the best” and it was the only thing you needed to use and it would fix all of your problems. And as we know, all of the tools for compressed air are just tools in the toolbox for us to use.

That’s how it started. They went back and forth on different names and chose “Compressed Air Challenge,” launching off the Motor Challenge, which was a big success at the time. And that’s how it came to be. Everybody asks now, “why Compressed Air Challenge?” Well, that’s why it happened and how it happened.

Building training that works for everyone

Thomas Wilk: Frank, you were there pretty close to the early days too. You mentioned that you walked into a room in Atlanta with 12 members already sitting there, waiting for you to come on in and contribute?

Frank Moskowitz: Yeah, and I think at that time—Joe, you can comment too on this—Deb Laurel, Deb Laurel and Associates, was already involved because we had to put training together. You know, it’s one thing to get these 10-12 people together in a room, all of them experts, and the goal was to put together training material. But if you let each guy do his piece, it would have been a book 10 inches thick. You couldn’t do that in one day’s training. So they hired Deb Laurel, and she puts together the documents, trains the trainers, things like that, right?

Joe Ghislain: Deb’s specialty, when we brought her on, was adult education—technical training and helping people develop training, and making sure you had all different types of learners in there. Since everybody learns differently, we needed to make sure we captured everyone.

Frank Moskowitz: Teaching the adult learner is a whole psychology in itself. So she helped, and that’s what I remember. I remember they had to pick instructors, and these guys were going to be the original instructors. But she said, “Some of you can’t do it.” Now, I had a background in secondary education—grades 7 through 12. Amy McCann liked that, that’s why she brought me in, because she said, “I think you’re the only educator here.” So that worked, still do it today. 

Deb made the book to a point where it could be an 8-hour class, and all the extra references went to the back. During the course of this training, she eliminated many instructors. Many instructors could not cut it.

Joe Ghislain: And the other thing that was interesting is many of them went through the normal, old-school style—stand up and lecture. We didn’t have PowerPoint at that time. We were doing it on the flimsy floppy overheads, so it goes back a ways. But she taught us real quick that’s not the way to teach, and that’s not the way people learn. Some people learn that way, some people learn by reading, and some people are kinesthetic—they’ve got to use their hands all the time. So we learned a lot of tricks and traits.

I actually had the opportunity to work with Deb—well, Frank and I worked with her on both Fundamentals and Advanced. I also got the opportunity to work with her again when she did a train-the-trainer program for ISO 50000 SEP trainers and coaches for the Department of Energy. So it was great working with her.

Frank Moskowitz: Once she eliminated the instructors that were no good, and we found the ones who were good, we moved forward. The manual, the workbook she helped us create—she created instructor notes, so everybody looking at the materials knew exactly what do you do for this hour, what do you say, what’s the process. It worked. It was seamless. And the end result is still viable today—perfect, still never changed.

Joe Ghislain: Right after we rolled out Fundamentals, a year, year and a half after that we rolled out Advanced, because Fundamentals was such a success. People said, “We want more. We need more training.” So that’s when Advanced came out, for digging deeper into the areas we only touched on in Fundamentals.

Frank Moskowitz: Fundamentals was intended to be an awareness-raising course only, to teach engineers, maintenance guys, and plant operators that basic layer—those who really didn’t have knowledge of anything back then.

Ron Marshall: I got involved on the receiving side. I was working for the power utility at the time, auditing compressed air systems, and every single compressed air system had problems. We figured out that the problems were that people didn’t know how to operate and maintain their compressed air systems properly.

It was great when Compressed Air Challenge came out. I wasn’t involved in the inception—I think my anniversary is 19 years—but we quickly realized, once that first training rolled out, that it was very effective in changing and tuning  “between the ears” of the users, right? So they knew what to do with their systems: how to improve them, measure them, baseline them. Very, very effective – just about every single one of the people who took the training we hosted for our power utility actually took part in our programs and upgraded their systems. So, excellent training—to this day, very effective.

Energy efficiency, production pressures, and real-world impact

Maya Schwartz: We talked a little bit about the evolution of CAC, and I’d like to harp on that a bit more. As industry awareness of energy-efficient practices has evolved, how does that reflect in what CAC teaches? And has it always been a priority?

Frank Moskowitz: Well, let me jump on that. The energy efficiency part—I’ve been doing this for a very long time, not only with Compressed Air Challenge but also doing compressed air audits. When I go into a plant—I’ve done thousands of them—the folks there, they’re not interested in, “Hey, can you drop my energy today?” They called me in because they had scrap rate issues, they couldn’t get parts out the door, compressors were breaking down, overheating, shutting off, pressure drop all over the place. Just a screwy system, like Ron was commenting on. And the reason was: they didn’t know anything about their system.

Now, the energy part follows—when you optimize the system, energy drops with it. Only a handful of customers of mine say, “Frank, we have a mandate from corporate, we need to drop energy.” That’s different. But most customers that call in, their systems are junk—literally junk—and we’ve got to fix it, and it’s still that way today. I can go to a job tomorrow, and the first thing the customer will say is, “Oh, I’ve got pressure problems here, we can’t get this machine to work, we’ve got scrap.” It’s the same story every time. Nothing’s changed in 20–30 years.

Joe Ghislain: So Frank’s right from the operator end, the priority—having been a boiler house chief and in charge at a stamping plant—as soon as the compressors went down, the plant went down, and all you-know-what broke loose. It was crazy, and that is the priority.

But I will say, first of all, the whole purpose of the Compressed Air Challenge and the training is efficiency. It’s about system operation and efficiency. Yes, we talk about quality of air. Yes, we talk about maintenance. But efficiency is the whole reason we do it—educating on it. What I found in industry—it was cyclical. There are times you’re making a lot and don’t have time for the equipment to be shut down and do maintenance, and when you do have the time, you don’t have the money to do maintenance, so it all matters what’s happening at that time.

When I started doing was, especially as a global energy efficiency manager and even at the plant, relating it to dollars, because they do understand dollars. If I could show them, “If you don’t do this, here’s what it’s going to cost you,” then I had a better chance of getting things done.

One thing I think that has changed for the awareness of overall energy efficiency: more companies are starting to put in energy management systems. Not just building automation, but the whole process of energy management—whether it’s something like DOE’s ISO 50001 Ready program or ISO 50001, companies are doing it for many reasons. Like Frank said, most of the time you’re not brought in to solve energy problems; you’re brought in to solve problems with the compressed air system, and energy efficiency is the fallout from it. But once you show the dollar savings, that’s what’s important.

As engineers and compressor people, we talk about saving kW, CFM, all that—but when you’re talking to management that isn’t what really relates. It’s the dollars. That portion I think is important because I have seen as per auditing ISO 50,000 and working with clients to put the 50,000 system in, there's times that the compressed air system is their significant energy use and their focus of their system. Again, that's not a lot of companies, but a lot of the bigger companies are starting to look towards that as they look at cost goals, and some of them are also looking at decarbonization goals and net-zero that they've signed up for. So there's a number of reasons why people do it. 

The important part is making the systems more efficient, more operational, and you get exactly what Frank said, once you've done that, you get the benefit of production issues going away and and actually being able to manage the system.

Thomas Wilk: Let’s talk about the training levels. You mentioned there’s a Fundamentals and an Advanced course. Do your clients treat this like an OSHA course, where they’ll come back year after year to teach the new group of workers at these plants the Fundamentals? Do you find a lot of folks take that Fundamentals class and want to build on it immediately—or in a couple of months—with the Advanced course?

Frank Moskowitz: The Fundamentals course people would take, probably because—mostly it’s vendors wanting to do it. Manufacturers now, you know, Ron and Joe would know that back in the day, especially Joe, this thing was made for end users. Little by little, when I’d poll a class to see who was in there, it would be sales guys and service guys. Sometimes it would be utility people coming in who worked with customers. So you kind of had to morph the training a little bit, because they’re not end users. They weren’t going to go back to a compressed air system.

And then what happened is, when CAGI got more involved, currently they have training, the Certified Compressed Air System Specialist exam—an ANSI-accredited exam—that really gave us a boost. All of a sudden people were saying, “Yeah, I took Fundamentals, and I want to take that course. I want to get the certification. I’m going to have to take Level 2 now.”

So you know, we get Level 1 in, which is the Fundamentals, and Level 2 in, which is the Advanced. And that pretty much prepares them almost for completing that first exam. That helped us a lot. Up until then, it was just people’s own interest: “Hey, I really like this. I want to go for the second one.” Now they have a reason.

Joe Ghislain: I think Frank made a good point. That’s one thing that’s happened as far as the transformation of compressed air and what it’s done in the industry for efficiency. It’s actually done a couple of things a lot of people may not even be aware of.

As I said, CAGI was one of the sponsors of the Compressed Air Challenge. The other sponsors kept saying, “Hey, you know what? The people out in the plant and the facilities—they’re confused. Everybody’s using all these different terms—SCFM, ICFM, FAD—all these different terms. They’re confused. Everybody says their machine’s the best. Why don’t you go through and come up with a program to do it?”

Well, there was reluctance at first. But I think also pressure from the end users, because I’ve seen a lot of pushback now from the end users on efficiency, pushing the manufacturers to do anything. Frank gets to see it from the “come in and fix it” side. I’m seeing it from the “this is what we want to do, this is how we have to do it” side, because they’re learning that life cycle costs are important and operational costs are big—which we teach in the Compressed Air Challenge. So they start learning that and start saying, “Hey, we want to know this.”

So long story short: CAGI worked with their members, and they started that certification program. That was actually the genesis of how it started. A lot of people don’t know that, because again, it wasn’t important as far as the education of the end user. Because now—it’s like the educated consumer is the best person—they have a place to go. They can do the comparison, and manufacturers know what they have and know what their competition’s doing as well. So I think that’s been a real important part of it.

And it does depend on who the sponsors are, if it’s people sponsoring from the compressed air industry—manufacturers, distributors—they have a tendency to be manufacturers, distributors, maybe a couple of their big clients, but not a lot of end users in. OK, there are exceptions, but that’s what I’ve seen. 

Now, if it’s a utility or a company sponsoring it—because I do a number of utility ones—then it’s almost all end users. I mean, you get a couple of the utility people who do the programs and things like that, but the majority of them end up being end users. So I think it depends on which angle they’re coming from when they’re hosting it and what they’re really looking to get out of the training. And as Frank said, the Compressed Air Challenge has now become the base knowledge and information of compressed air. Because CAGI said, “Yep, we want to use this as a big part of the basis for our individual certifications.”

Ron Marshall: Yeah. More on the question—the training started out as live training only. And we found over time, there were people who just couldn’t make it due to cost or complications like they couldn’t host the training. So Frank actually put together a webinar version of the training, hosted on GoToWebinar. The in-person training started out as the only thing we could do. Then we added the webinar version, and in the era of COVID, that was the only way we could deliver training, and now it’s the most popular method. People from around the world can attend instead of having to travel. We’ve had people from Asia, Russia, Australia, New Zealand—you name it—because it’s webinar-based. You can take it from anywhere, so it’s become more flexible. Now it’s starting to snap back to more in-person, which is definitely the most effective way to train because of the interaction. But webinars remain the most cost-effective.

Joe Ghislain: Yeah, we started with the fundamentals. Actually, Frank, myself, and two others were the instructors for the original. Then we revamped it. Ironically, back when we started it—what was it, 2011, 2012, Frank? Somewhere in that time frame, if my brain’s right?

Frank Moskowitz: Yeah, I mean, COVID gave us the kick in the pants because we were going to lose money.

Joe Ghislain: Yeah. What happened was that it fizzled (online), people just didn’t want to do online training. And like Frank said, as soon as COVID hit, everybody had to switch the way they do things. The whole world changed. Some good came out of it, because people realized you can work remotely. You don’t always have to be in an office or in person.

The training was very effective. Frank put together some really good animations to keep people engaged, because when you’re doing it online, you have to do more to keep people engaged. In a classroom, it’s easier to read the room. But when people are at a monitor and trying to gauge it, are they doing that or are they off doing something else. So we have ways to monitor that, and it is effective at both fundamentals and advanced levels. But like Ron said, it still doesn’t beat in-person training—just because of ability to have exercises and the people contact.

Frank Moskowitz: But what we've created it is the closest thing to an in-person.—we could do pop quizzes and polls and tests. And, you know, I’ve got 4 monitors on my desk. I can keep an eye on everybody; I even tell them what shoes they're wearing. They get nervous when I tell them that.

Joe Ghislain: The other thing I’ll also add real quick is, Frank mentioned a lot of it, but even in the webinar version, we have the ability to do breakout sessions. Because one thing with Compressed Air Challenge, you have to keep people engaged. So it's not a lecture. There's a lot of working in groups, working in teams, working together, and conversation happens. And yet everybody probably learns as much or more from the people in the group than just from the training itself.