How to maximise your maintenance training

Is traditional training losing its edge?

Face-to-face training has long been the staple of corporate and educational environments. The immediate interaction between trainer and trainee has its advantages. But because of the surge of online learning technologies…

Online training has become more effective than traditional training.

And let me explain why. See, most training programs in our industry today are STILL done through 3-5 day live webinars, workshops, or some sort of in-person event.

Now, compared to digital learning, there are a few problems with this—

1) Three days is NOT enough to learn everything you need to learn!

See, short intensive training programs result in—

1. low levels of knowledge retention
2. very limited change in the client organisations.
3. and in general, pretty poor return-on-investment.

Take Maintenance Planning & Scheduling for example:

You need to learn—

Backlog Management Planning & Scheduling Process Planning & Scheduling Principles How to prioritise new work requests

How to create a Frozen Weekly Schedule

How to deal with emergency work How to create effective work instructions

And so on…

But if you cram all that into 3 days… Then it’s like you’re drinking from a hose! You get a HUGE amount of information in a short amount of time— Difficult to retain. Difficult to absorb. Difficult to remember.

2) There’s no way to assess whether you’ve learned anything or not.

Live workshops simply give you the information… And leave you to figure out everything on your own. No exams. No feedback. No assignments. Three months after the training, you will have forgotten most of what was covered in those courses. And you have no chance to go back and review them.

No wonder many improvement initiatives born from these training programs fail.

Sounds familiar? And it gets worse…

3) It’s not enough to train a few key individuals.

Many organisations believe it can get expensive to train a lot of people. That’s why they only train a few key individuals. Not to mention the huge losses if that training program doesn’t get you results.

So, they try to ‘play it safe’.

But that’s not enough. For change to take place, you need to create a culture of reliability. And to create that, you need to train your ENTIRE team.

Otherwise, you won’t see any significant changes because you will encounter resistance.

4) They’re expensive!

If you’re going to enroll in a typical Planning & Scheduling training program… You’ll spend $1200 to $4000 per person for a 3-5 day live webinar training or workshop.

You might also need to spend money on food, travel, and accommodation expenses. Especially if the event is somewhere far from where you live. And once you’re travelling it is not unheard of for total costs to get to 2-3 times the cost of the actual training course.

Not to mention the opportunity costs of having these individuals away from work to attend these live training events.

But despite those expensive costs—

• You won’t get all the tools and templates you need.
• You won’t get an implementation framework.
• You won’t have regular access to somebody who you can ask about the implementation process.
• You won’t have lifetime access. So you can’t go back to review the lessons.
• You’ll have to learn everything within the space of a few days.

It’s clear that for our industry, traditional training has become obsolete.

That’s why if you’re looking to train your team…

Here’s a few things you need to consider:

1. Training a few individuals isn’t enough. To create change, you need to train your entire team to build a culture of reliability.
2. It’s difficult to get a big group of people into one place to train them for a few days.
3. Short intensive training programs aren’t effective. You need a training program where people can go learn at their own pace over longer periods of time.
4. Feedback is important when it comes to learning. So look for training that gives quizzes, assignments, or exams.

We’ve created our courses with these things in mind.

So if you’re looking for a self-paced, online training program that ticks those boxes…

Then check out our online courses using this link.

Train my team in the basics

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways we can help you on your Road to Reliability:

1. Want to train your team on how to improve your plant's maintenance reliability?

Enroll your team in one of our most popular online training courses:

Implementing Maintenance Planning and Scheduling—increase your maintenance workforce by 35% without hiring anyone. Reduce costs, improve safety and increase morale.

Developing and Improving Preventive Maintenance Programs—achieve higher reliability and availability whilst doing less maintenance. Acquire the knowledge and tools needed to create a highly effective and efficient Preventive Maintenance Program.

2. Want to know how effective your Planning & Scheduling really is?

Use our Planning & Scheduling Scorecard?to assess your performance and receive a personalised PDF report with recommendations on how to improve.

Use our Wrench Time Calculator?to easily calculate how much value your organisation is missing out when you neglect your Planning & Scheduling.

3. Want to start your journey on the road to reliability?

Download the Reliability Academy eBook?and discover a simple, proven framework that you can use to achieve a highly reliable plant for your organisation. Unlike other overly complicated models that use 10 to 20 elements, the Road to Reliability framework only uses 4 elements to achieve great results.