[Luis Manuel Barreiro]

There are several considerations to take care when you decide to go for one or other type of training:

-Object of the training: Virtual works fine with software, but when you go for physical devices, specially when they have fine adjustments, physical presence cannot be replaced. For procedures and similar, LMS is an option.

-Travel options for trainees. If you have trainees from a single location, physical makes sense, but if there’s people from all over the world, sometimes you need to be more flexible. Recent pandemy showed us some hybrid solutions. For us, hybrid training (trainer via vídeo to show procedure and solve doubts and co-trainers – expert senior FSE’s – locally to show trainees the physical part) worked fine, even with complex devices.

-Mixed options. You can use LMS for theory and physical training for practical part.

-VR. Not sure about the maturity of this tech for training. It can help for simple parts, but sometimes you need to feel the real thing, like how much tenths of a turn you need for a fine adjustment. I think this can help in the future to simplify trainings, but not completely replace the physical training.

[Tim Robertson]

Thanks for these thoughts Luis.

How is it decided what course an engineer takes?

Are engineers able to do training courses that they think would be beneficial or are the courses that engineers go on chosen by their manager? Or a mix of both?

[Russell Neyhart]

Until we have virtual technology on the level of the Holodecks portrayed in Star Trek where the subject it able to experience the training environment as real as if they were in the real world, I believe that there is no substitute for in-person hands-on training.

Field Service is not virtual or remote, as illustrated during the pandemic where those of us serving clinical customers were still traveling far afield to customer sites to provide service.

Virtual training is useful in addition to, but not in place of, live in-person training when it comes to actually working on something. Virtual training is more suited to software systems.

Regards,

Russell