high-angle view of city — Photo by Tomas Williams on Unsplash

Everyone in CPR training is trying to make things better.

Credentialing bodies launch find‑a‑class tools and new modality‑specific directories
Big TCs build their own “find a class” pages for their locations
Agencies spin up nicer websites, funnels, and SEO campaigns

All of that helps someone. It’s like airlines improving their seats, apps, and boarding processes. That’s their job.

But it doesn’t build the airport.

Right now, the “plumbing” underneath most of the industry looks like this:

Every TC has its own way of building classes in their registration software
Coordinators maintain giant spreadsheets or Airtable bases to plan classes
Classes get manually posted to AHA, ARC, or TC‑specific directories
Instructors email PDFs and CSVs after the fact so someone can reconcile rosters and cards

You can put ten better class-finder experiences on top of that and still never get:

Clean, reliable discovery for students
Accurate, machine‑readable class inventory
Easy routing for employers who just need staff trained somewhere this month

Not because the airlines/directories are “bad,” but because they’re only solving their slice.

An AHA or ARC directory will always be optimized around its own programs.
A TC‑specific directory will always be optimized around its own locations.
An agency‑built software will always be optimized around whatever stack the client is already on.

None of them has the incentive (or the business model) to build infrastructure that helps everyone:

Standardized course + location data
Shared, structured inventory of classes across providers
Plumbing that stays accurate as reality changes (cancellations, guideline updates, instructor changes)

That’s the airport. It makes every airline more efficient. It attracts travelers who wouldn’t have flown otherwise. But no single airline builds it, because the airport helps all of them.

CPR is stuck in the “better airline, no airport” phase. We keep reinventing nicer front doors to the same brittle house. We keep fighting over the same people who are already certified, instead of making it easy for new people to enter.

Until the plumbing exists, directories and websites will keep hitting the same ceiling: they can’t outperform the data they sit on.

So next time you hear “we’re launching a new directory” or “we’re investing in SEO,” the real question isn’t:

“What will the homepage look like?”

It’s:

“Where will the data come from, and how will it stay correct when the real world changes?”

— Jon

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