The Faraday Centre Reviews

Some of the course content needs refining, and more practical switching

Quite a few mistakes picked up on the course notes. For a bespoke course there was an awful lot of difference in opinions as to how things are carried out from what has been taught to what is actually utilised offshore for the company. Course is needing reviewed to align with RWE OSR's.

The course was not what I thought it would be, I was hoping for more in depth look into more advanced protection systems (transformer diff distance protection etc.) but was only read information from a PowerPoint for a few hours and gave an exam on it. The rest of the week we were given a very repetitive task and a guide to follow. There where countless mistakes on the test schedule given and when we told the lecturer about these issues he didn’t seem too bothered and where told to just continue as it says.

Set up for regulations. TechnipFMC have made the course simple and with less and less content over the years. Just covers the legal side.

The lecturer didn’t assess his audience. 70% of which were not electricians. The course was far too in depth for operations as it was referring to testing for dead in cabinets, HV systems etc. as far as we know, Ops Techs will not be carrying out this type of testing. Lecturer was very pleasant and had a lot of knowledge, way above the understanding of operations requirement.

Great facilities exactly what was needed to gain experience. Lectures didn't seem to want to veer from their script. When asking questions it seemed like a hassle and most the time didnt get a clear answer from Norman. Practical was good equipment but it was so slow going around you never got a full go of isolating and restoring just one or the other. While eddies group seemed to have a full go themselves. More information could be added to the training folders as info seems to be missed that is spoken about on the power points. Coffee/tea and food all good and plenty of breaks to break up the day.

This week is more practical, how ever still didn't learn anything on the relays the lecturer doesn't know how to set the relay timer and when one off the lads asked if he could set it up first and explain how it's done he said "he can't be arsed I only have a week left" he also said that he doesn't know anything about this course cause he never teachers this course and only knows HV and always does the HV course which another lecturer is doing who usually does this course meaning that we where purposely given the wrong lecturer...

The course in parts is not relevant to our day to day work. Large sections were irrelevant and tough to pay attention to. There is also no certification for us to achieve which made the course boring some weeks as there was nothing to attain so hard to keep concentrated. The weekly sections should be shortened and be more tailored to Siemens needs. More fault finding and testing should be included. I also feel the course should be shortened. The instructor Phil, and Dave who we had for a week were excellent and extremely patient given we had little knowledge of electrics before hand. It was a pleasure to be taught by Phil who tried his best to keep things interesting throughout. I suggest the SGRE training department sit on a course to realise how large parts of the course were useless to us.

Knowledgable tutor with lots of experience. The course perhaps could’ve been designed better to deliver the required information.

Norman was a brilliant lecturer but unfortunately it was not the correct course for us. We were expecting an electrical basics course but instead it was a basic HV awareness course. The faraday centre was a good training venue and hopefully next time we can be on a course which suits us better.