From Awareness to Competency: How to Get Educated

  • Post category:PI NEWS
  • Reading time:4 mins read

This month’s issue of PROFINEWS focuses on the many training opportunities available from PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) -many of which you may be familiar, and some you may not.

While Industrial Automation may not be the fastest moving industry in the world, something new is still being introduced seemingly daily. Whether that means new hardware, new software, new techniques, or innovative ways to do business, the evolution continues. For example, here in this very publication every month there is a New Products article highlighting new pieces of hardware available. PROFINEWS is an excellent resource to get top-of-mind awareness about the topics important to PI. But awareness is not competency. So for each step of the learning process, PI offers various ways to get educated.

After reading PROFINEWS, what next?


Videos

To easily jump into the PROFIBUS or PROFINET technologies, a great place to start is YouTube. Videos, as a medium, most efficiently deliver an incredible amount of information in a short amount of time. Two YouTube channels of note include:

Documentation

Marketing Flyers and White Papers can be downloaded on almost every PI technology and provide a very high-level overview.

For example, the recently released PI White Paper: Security Extensions for PROFINET addresses the fact that pervasive networking in companies, the vertical integration and the trend toward flatter system hierarchies require comprehensive approaches for IT security in production.

Think you know PROFIBUS, PROFINET, IO-Link, PROFIsafe, and PROFIdrive in-depth? Have you read their accompanying System Descriptions? These documents start at a high level and quickly get into the details. Significant resources have been invested to build and refine these over the years, and from a documentation perspective are the places to go:

Webinars

Webinars are a great opportunity to go into depth on a given topic for an extended timeframe at your convenience. Webinars are available on a variety of subjects and the collection of those archived is continually growing. Live webinars are also presented frequently, for example on August 21st:

Training

Finally, the most important leg in the journey from awareness to competency is training. Learning-by-doing is still the way we truly understand something. Invest a little time and discover the many hands-on training opportunities available from PI. Then, invest and little more time and get yourself trained!

PITC (PI Training Center)

What is a PITC? A PITC is an institute that offers standardized educational sessions aimed at raising the knowledge level of engineers and technicians in several important areas of PROFIBUS and PROFINET. Successful trainees are awarded Certified Engineer or Installer status. PITCs are subject to a Quality-of-Service Agreement administered by PI to ensure the technical excellence of the training they deliver. Each PITC is audited regularly to maintain that high level of quality. The full list of PITCs around the globe can be found here:

Contact a local PITC today to find out what’s being offered in your region!