Wayward Leaders, VFD Training and Reliability

News

News and Coverage

Announcements from the practice, and where they ran.

Each release below links to the wire copy rather than reprinting it here. A release goes out to AP News and a few hundred syndication sites the same morning, so a copy on this page would add nothing except another near-identical version of a story that already exists everywhere. What is written here instead is the part that is not in the release.

September 29, 2026

Industrial Drive Trainer Carl Lee Tolbert Earns ATD Master Trainer Designation

The Association for Talent Development runs an eight-week program that ends in a live, observed assessment of how you actually teach. It is the first credential I hold that evaluates the instruction rather than the subject, which matters in a trade where the usual proof of a good instructor is that he knows a lot about drives.

Where it ran

September 29, 2026. Picked up by AP News, Manufacturing News Today, and television affiliates including KXAN Austin, WDAF Kansas City, KOIN Portland, WLNS Lansing, KHON Honolulu, KSNT Topeka, WDTN Dayton, WJBF Augusta, WJTV Jackson, KLFY Lafayette, KAMR Amarillo and News Radio KOTA.

Syndicated placements are published by the outlets themselves and are not endorsements. Wire services and house style commonly strip trademark symbols from body copy, so the ATD Master Trainer mark appears without one in the distributed text.

Press enquiries

Carl Lee Tolbert is available to comment on variable frequency drive reliability, industrial maintenance training, and workforce development in the skilled trades. Ways to reach the practice, and background and credentials.

Wayward Leaders® is a veteran-owned VFD training practice. We teach maintenance teams and plant electricians to install, commission, and troubleshoot variable frequency drives correctly, in person, at the plant that owns the equipment, anywhere in the United States.

Every class ends with a scored competency assessment. The plant gets a way to prove what each technician can do, not a roster of who sat in the room.

The instruction is field-trained. It is drawn from nearly 8,000 VFD, power, and motor documents and from more than 750 commissioned drives captured through personal field experience and data collection. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, and ATD Master Trainer™, leads it. He has delivered more than 5,000 hours of VFD instruction across 30 years and trained 8,000 industrial professionals, from International Paper to the U.S. Navy.

The premise is simple: VFDs do not fail. Installations fail them. The curriculum is built backward from that.

Installation, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fault diagnosis guides are published openly at waywardleaders.com.