Training

[swatts]

My company is getting serious about training. I am supposed to find out what is available either through Autodesk or others, in order to get all our drafters and many of our engineers able to work in Revit structure. What sorts of outside training programs have any of you used sucessfully in your companies? We want something that is fairly quick and concentrated (as opposed to a semester long course at a college).

Any words of wisdom, or warnings?

~Sarah

[Tom Weir]

Hi,
Where are you located? Here in LA resellers like LA Cad offer solid one and two day programs at a decent price.

There are also on-line courses here on AUGI and in the subscription center at the Autodesk site.

Tom Weir
Los Angeles

[Jos Arpink]

Hi Sarah,
Our reseller also offers a 2-day course in RS, so maybe your reseller can be of assistance.

We do most of our training in-house.
To start, we ask new users to go through selected tutorials. Ongoing training happens at weekly Revit meetings (donuts provided) as well as in-line with doing work as questions get asked and (hopefully) answered. Often, the questions that get asked provide fodder for the next meeting so it's somewhat self perpetuating.

Either way, if you can't get training to happen 'just-in-time', there's a chance that the skills learned will be forgotten when it comes time to work on a real job. If you go to an outside source, try to get them to meet your schedule.

Hope that helps.

[david_peterson]

There's Always Augi!
That's how learned.
Thanks Tom, Paul, Rick.......and the rest.

[swatts]

Thanks for all your replys.
Several people here have said they think they just won't learn much in self-directed/in-house training due to too many distractions. Taking them out of the office and sitting them down with an instructor will keep them from drifting off into other things..albeit at a subtantial cost...but if that's what it takes we may have to do it. I think I'd combine it with some preparation using tutorials and in-house presentations so we can make the most of the classroom time.
Does anyone have experience with either Cad-1 or Avatech for training?

~Sarah

[david_peterson]

On that same note, here's how we accomplished in-house training. We had an extra room that now contains our extra workstations and on older projector. When we need to train ourselfs we go into that room, shut the door, and did the tutorials. This takes out the distractions, and you don't have to pay for the instructor. We have one person here that did take a few classes and also spent a week at AU this year and last and has been deemed the "Revit Expert" for our office.

We started out with the tutorials, then had our "Expert" spend a day with us, then went off on our own. Once you get beyond the basics, that's I'd suggest you get an Adesk Certified Expert. We've had our vendor come to our office for training in the past and I've felt that we never had enough time to cover the "Harder" stuff. One of the main problems I've found is that you get some people that are very CAD and Computer savey, and some people that have no clue. By learning the basics before you ever pay someone to come in, you can find out who's going to get it and who's going to hold the class back.

Just a thought.