PLC training

I'm thinking of taking some PLC courses to help bolster what I'm learning via OJT with some actual guided lesson plans. Are any of the online courses worth a damn? What is the general consensus on a good source of training? This is on my own dime, so money is a factor, but certainly not the only one. I'm willing to pay the money for training, as long as what I am receiving is known high quality.

IMO purchase used PLC and software hands on it do every day

like other member said brutal the software and hardware

after that go for offical training

SiriusMark said:

Are any of the online courses worth a damn? What is the general consensus on a good source of training?

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I dont know of any 'online' that are very good from what I have seen... I have not seen them all so there maybe some good ones

Your on the job will be the best, we offer some training but that also depends on the platform you are looking to learn, if AB 500 then you can get the free software and buy a 1000 or 1100 CPU and do your own training, if its your 'dime' or even if you want to save your company some money, eBay is a great option

geniusintraining said:

I dont know of any 'online' that are very good from what I have seen... I have not seen them all so there maybe some good ones

Your on the job will be the best, we offer some training but that also depends on the platform you are looking to learn, if AB 500 then you can get the free software and buy a 1000 or 1100 CPU and do your own training, if its your 'dime' or even if you want to save your company some money, eBay is a great option

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Thanks. I actually found the entire Rockwell training suite on our installation disk yesterday and installed it. To be honest, I'd never realized it was there. I think that should be more than sufficient, at least for now. The vast majority of what we work on is Allen Bradley, and those items which are not Allen Bradley are usually some proprietary piece of equipment that training isn't available on anyhow. Getting a more solid grip on the AB/Rockwell package will help out a lot.

Having just now gone through 4 weeks of official AB training at a cost to my company of around $6k for the classes and $3k in expenses and a month's pay for me, I can say with 100% certainty that it is not worth the money. Only one of the four trainers could answer questions evenly slightly more technical than the information presented in the course, there was a lot of repeat material, and even the "advanced" classes were geared toward basic introduction. You're better off just going through the help for each instruction and watching the videos on the start page.

To contrast with that, our AB distributor arranged a free, one-on-one training session for a day and a half with a very knowledgeable guy. I got a lot out of that and he had an answer for every question I threw at him. If you can swing this, then it is definitely the way to go (you would need to be a big AB customer, I'm sure).

Back in the day when I was working for someone else, what we did a LOT... we were a large company and hired a lot of outside contractors, we would always have the good ones back for training, when we got our first Mitsubishi CPU based machine we had a local contractor do some custom training for our maintenance guys and it did help, the machine was 4 Q06 CPU's and 6 GOT HMI's all networked together


I also did the AB training, it depends a lot on the instructor... the advanced class was just OK, but the intro class was good and the RSView class was GREAT, they were all different instructors and that made the class

All of the AB training now goes to Ron Beaufort

I would like to brag up Automation Training's online courses for a moment. I like try to take at least one course each year in something just to keep up on things, and get questions answered. I have taken more than a few courses there and once you get started you won't even remember that the instructor is not in the same room with you. Each student has a remote desktop connection to a PLC and every question gets answered promptly. There are some really knowledgeable dudes there who I believe just enjoy what they are doing. The prices are excellent as well. They are great courses for somebody who has never touched a PLC or somebody with some skills and a lot of questions. Sometimes I have been lucky enough to be the only student in the course. That's a good way to learn!
I have been trying to get into Rockwell's Studio 5000 Project Development course now for a while but there never seems to be enough enrollment to run the course in my area. Maybe its a good sign for job stability but its frustrating.