Do you help your Tech School?

[SLC_Integrator]

I guess the overriding tone is todays 'Gimme it NOW' mentality.


Years ago in the dark ages I started off as an instrument tech on pneumatic instrumentation. Average time to remove, clean, service, calibrate and recommission a loop was perhaps a 10 hour day depending on what was in the loop.
It required special tools (those cool little foxboro toolkits the mechanical guys used to laugh at), alot of skill, time and experience to get it to work.
Nowadays with HART and AMS I can commission a DCS loop in about 10 minutes.

People would rather just pay someone else to figure it our or throw it away and buy a new one. It seems lately 1 in 10 field instruments are junk whereas I cant ever remember throwing away a Foxboro 13a because it was irrepairable.

So unless you ENJOY figuring stuff out and saving $$$ as a side benefit it seems it'll only get worse.

 

[tim2]

Hold yer hosses there.

I have been doing doing maintenance for many yers...WITHOUT anything but do have a 2 yr degree but its a POS, working on an EE.

The 2 year courses teach nothing, its just a way to get money from young people.

Tell ya what, get a 2 year student to draw ya a stop/start ckt.

I have to agree with RSDoran on this one. The two year schools around where I live are nothing you want to steer your kids into. I was unfortunate enough to teach at one of these after I came back from a couple of years in the UK while looking for more appropriate work. The kids were charged about $30,000 for a two year degree. The only real requirement for them to get into the school was that they could get the financial aid to cover the costs. I talked to many of the students who were finally realizing in their last sememster that there student loan bills were going to kill them with what they were going to make when they got out of the school.

In the classes I taught, there were usually about 2 out of 10 or 15 people that actually had any business being there and that I thought would leave and could be a productive employee in their field. The others could hardly work a calculator. We were pretty much informed to pass everybody (they didn't get their student loan checks if they failed out). This led to an almost abnormally high "success" rate that they would use to lure potential students.

I taught both day and night classes, and the bad experiences were mainly with the day classes, these were the kids. The night classes were typically students who were already working and trying to better themselves, and they were at least motivated, tried, and got alot more out of the classes.

I don't think you can really compare the two year degrees here with the two year degrees (if these are even available in Germany). I don't know anything about the schools in Germany, but I know that not a whole lot translated between US-UK even with younger kids in school. The UK education was a lot different, and in a lot of ways better than what my kids got before we left for the UK and after we returned.