Content of Core Electrician Courses, how do we change it?

I am so not sure about dropping 1st principles and diluting down the teaching of electric motor theory. By all means re-examine stuff which is obsolete but do not remove the building bricks and replace them with sand.

When I did my C&G 200 series course back in the mid 70's we had the 1st year full-time with broad-based training based on the old EITB model. Some of this was effectively redundant. We were taught about Ward Leonard set-ups, D.C. Faceplate starters, some of which were still in use in the local coal industry. We were also taught about intrinsically safe installations too.

Where I used to work we had 2 old Butler horizontal planers with 20ft moving beds. These were Ward Leonard set-ups due to the finer speed control you got back then with D.C. motors. No IP protection in panels back in those days. The machines dated back to the 1940s when the place was set up as a shadow factory for the war effort, so lots of live D.C. stuff to brush your tender pinkies on if you weren't careful.

Faceplate starters? Never ever saw one in the wild. Intrinsically safe installations? This was aimed mainly at coal mines rather than petrochemical plants, and since this wasn't the sector I worked in, I never had to deal with one for real.

A.C. Theory, magnetism etc were useful when it came to applying knowledge gained through hands on experience. I did the 1st year 'Technicians course' (T1) in parallel but found it staid. The only processor I leaned about apart from resistors, rectifiers capacitors and transistors was the 555 timer chip. Again, of very limited use. Back then, if we didn't know what a chip did, we just unsoldered it, replaced it with the correct I.C. socket from RS and kept on swapping chips until we got a piece of kit working again - photocopier engineering style. Most of the time we never really understood how we got something working again!

So, even back then, there were redundant legacy anomalies still being taught, even if hardly relevant most of the time.

I am so not sure about dropping 1st principles and diluting down the teaching of electric motor theory. By all means re-examine stuff which is obsolete but do not remove the building bricks and replace them with sand.

When I did my C&G 200 series course back in the mid 70's we had the 1st year full-time with broad-based training based on the old EITB model. Some of this was effectively redundant. We were taught about Ward Leonard set-ups, D.C. Faceplate starters, some of which were still in use in the local coal industry. We were also taught about intrinsically safe installations too.

Where I used to work we had 2 old Butler horizontal planers with 20ft moving beds. These were Ward Leonard set-ups due to the finer speed control you got back then with D.C. motors. No IP protection in panels back in those days. The machines dated back to the 1940s when the place was set up as a shadow factory for the war effort, so lots of live D.C. stuff to brush your tender pinkies on if you weren't careful.

Faceplate starters? Never ever saw one in the wild. Intrinsically safe installations? This was aimed mainly at coal mines rather than petrochemical plants, and since this wasn't the sector I worked in, I never had to deal with one for real.

A.C. Theory, magnetism etc were useful when it came to applying knowledge gained through hands on experience. I did the 1st year 'Technicians course' (T1) in parallel but found it staid. The only processor I leaned about apart from resistors, rectifiers capacitors and transistors was the 555 timer chip. Again, of very limited use. Back then, if we didn't know what a chip did, we just unsoldered it, replaced it with the correct I.C. socket from RS and kept on swapping chips until we got a piece of kit working again - photocopier engineering style. Most of the time we never really understood how we got something working again!

So, even back then, there were redundant legacy anomalies still being taught, even if hardly relevant most of the time.

Examining the wiring diagram of a face plate starter involved investigation and the theory of how it works. Useful stuff.

Z.

It would not be building on sand, rather building on what is relevant. This is all the more important now that many of these courses run on much less than half the teaching hours they used to. Such are modern economic pressures.