Summer 2022 State of Audio Visual Service

We have some difficult and immediate changes to our Audio-Visual (AV) service. Engineering IT’s two remaining AV staff members have recently accepted positions elsewhere on campus, leaving us devoid of professional AV expertise for the immediate future.  

While we celebrate our colleagues’ successes, Engineering IT will be feeling the loss of their knowledge and experience. This loss will affect the progress of existing summer projects and impede our ability to easily address complicated AV issues that might arise. While this is a hard blow both for our customers and for us internally, we expect it to be temporary. We ask for your patience and grace as we work to ramp this team back up. 

What we are doing to mitigate and resolve our current shortfall: 

1. We have verbal acceptance from 2 full-time AV candidates with start dates later in the summer. It will take time for these candidates to be brought onboard and trained.
2. Engineering IT has tapped internal resources who are rapidly building knowledge and capability to support existing equipment and summer projects to which we’ve committed.
3. We are increasing our student hires for the summer to help with regular AV maintenance and daily incidentals.  

How you can help: 

1. Know your equipment – we can provide training on how to use conference room equipment to avoid unexpected surprises. 
2. Alert us about your events and needs as early as you possibly can to give us lead time.
3. Report problems promptly to engrit-help@illinois.edu.
4. Keep engaging with us as we rebuild and train our new staff.  

Engineering IT will continue to be the first point of contact for malfunctioning or broken equipment. Though our response times may be slower, please continue to send in your trouble tickets and requests for projects, consultations and design through engrit-help@illinois.edu. We want to stay connected, help where we can, and consult with you on how to move forward in cases where we cannot take on the work.