The growing sophistication of automation systems and controls, combined with leaner staff sizes, increased productivity requirements and the shortage of skilled workers, is creating new training challenges for manufacturers. And for automation vendors—which have traditionally provided training support for their products—today’s market realities are forcing a different approach to training services.

“If you look at industrial training over the past four or five years, it’s dramatically changed, in the way that our customers go about training—in terms of location, the type of training they do and how much training they do,” says Kevin Ives, business manager for training services at Rockwell Automation Inc., the big Milwaukee-based automation controls vendor.

Ives traces the start of the change to the economic downturn early in the decade, which led many manufacturers to slash staff sizes. With manufacturing more recently in a growth period, Ives says, many manufacturers are now buying new automation products in an effort to boost output and become more efficient. This creates a need for training on those products. But with maintenance and engineering staff sizes in some cases at half or less of what they once were, customers are clamoring for vendor training services that are designed with that reality in mind.

“I think the best way to describe it is that organizations have less time,” says Ives. “They’re not willing to travel, necessarily, to a training course. It needs to be delivered on site. And they’re not willing to take a course that was typically three or four days long,” he adds. “So we need to find a way to get the same number of topics into a course—tailored specifically to that customer—and be able to do it in two days.”

With some 200 full-time instructors and help from an additional 500 field engineers, Rockwell delivers around 3,500 industrial training classes annually, and offers about 250 standard “catalog” courses, says Ives. Those courses are broken into about 1,600 modules based on specific job tasks, he adds.

For customers who may want to reduce the amount of time their people spend in training, Rockwell has an answer. The company recently developed a “tailored training tool” that enables end-users to pick and choose the job tasks or modules to be included in a particular course, says Ives. Once selections are made, the tool responds with the quantity of course time required for each job task module chosen, and any prerequisites required. “You can build a course and get immediate feedback on how long the course will be, and the topics that would be covered, and typically within a week, we can have the manuals printed and delivered, and have an instructor on site or in one of our classrooms delivering the training,” Ives says.

As another way to meet the needs of time-constrained industrial customers, Rockwell and other automation vendors have also lately been stepping up their computer-based and online training offerings. A number of new Web-based courses are available from Emerson Process Management, for example, the Austin, Texas-based process automation vendor.

“We’re really expanding our online program,” says Jim Siemers, manager, educational services, process systems and solutions, at Emerson. “We are rolling out an e-learning program that will include our new DeltaV [control system] operator training, and we’re doing some online safety system training that trains on some of the new IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) standards.”

Emerson’s online offerings include a self-paced format—in which users rely on the Internet to access training material housed on an Emerson server—as well as a WebEx format, enabling customers to use the Web to interact directly with remote Emerson instructors.

In some cases, of course, online training can’t match the advantages of personal interaction and hands-on learning that trainees receive in a classroom situation. But Emerson customers are increasingly taking advantage of what Siemers calls “blended learning.” In this approach, trainees may receive their initial training on a control system in a classroom, and then receive training via the Internet when software or system upgrades are released.

“For someone who already has established skills, e-learning can be very cost-effective for moving them into the next hierarchy of software,” Siemers observes. “It’s a lot more effective than flying somebody into some location, or having our instructors travel and sending in equipment."

Roll-your-own training

Despite vendor efforts to better tailor their training to industrial customers’ needs, some manufacturing end-users are taking some training matters into their own hands. One example can be seen at The Hershey Co., the Hershey, Pa.-based chocolate and snack food manufacturer. ...