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Product category: Engineering Training Courses
News Release from: SMC Pneumatics (UK)
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 23 November 2000

SMC establishes advanced educational
benchmarks

SMC helps engineering visionaries establish advanced educational benchmarks.

Pioneering educational work that is establishing new benchmarks in the development and lifelong learning of both emergent and established engineers, is putting a geographical outpost firmly at the hub of best practice for the UK engineering industry For the staff and students of Banff and Buchan College, in the north-east of Scotland, are establishing new standards in engineering training

This is through a focused determination to be the best that has seen the Fraserburgh college scale new peaks, as a landmark centre, challenging the industry's traditional leaders as educational centres.

The rapid ascendancy and success of the college is not going unrecognised.

The EMTA Award of Scottish Modern Apprentice of the Year has been awarded to a Banff and Buchan trained apprentice.

Trinity House has just awarded the College a research grant of ?65 000 to look in to the safety at sea of Fishing vessels.

The MAIB, MCA and major insurers are all working with the college on developments in the engineering field.

And whilst the speed of events at Banff and Buchan might seem like an explosive sprint to prominence, it is not within the nature of those moulding events in Fraserburgh to aim for their '15 minutes of fame' as part of a glory-seeking quick fix.

The character of the community in such a remote environment would never allow for that and all concerned in helping establish such a strong track record know that for them their true test will be how they run the marathon of sustained continuity in education provision.

The starting line was drawn in 1996 when a determined effort was launched to significantly upgrade the college's educational provision to keep pace with industrial change and the increasing demands of vocational qualifications.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the rapidly growing field of National Certificate in Instrumentation and Control, Higher National Certificate and Diploma in Mechatronics.

Up until then the college had been reasonably well equipped with an amount of ageing yet still useful pneumatic and electronic equipment to support its until then traditional approach to training and education in these engineering areas.

This is the point where a step change was implemented, as the Technical Studies Department of the college made strenuous efforts to establish closer and intimate ties with the industry it was seeking to serve.

And this has provided the cornerstone of its current success, as Jim Reilly, the Head of Technical Studies at Banff and Buchan explained.

"The strongly emerging field of mechatronics and the crucial interface between pneumatics, electronics and computers, meant we had to very significantly upgrade our training equipment and facilities, if we were to compete within the national educational market.

It is necessary to provide our clients with what they needed to equip themselves, for the real engineering world, now and in the future." The advances in engineering technology had also driven a significantly greater demand, for a more sophisticated range of education and training provision.

This was driven by the main local industries of fishing and oil - both sectors of which had also provided a strong base for the college in marine engineering as a specialisation, in addition to its core-engineering base.

"Quite frankly, at that time we didn't have the kit to meet the great demand we were getting from local companies," added Senior Lecturer David Cook.

It was David Cook who was given the responsibility of establishing and cementing industrial relationships in the field, firstly with the client base throughout north-east Scotland but also on a national basis, particularly with the companies who became the College's partners in its development programme.

Within the Technical Studies Department, perhaps the most prominent of these is SMC Pneumatics who, through its own visionary management, made a massive commitment to helping David Cook and Jim Reilly create the mechatronics facilities it so sorely needed.

Fundamental to the mechatronics facility has been the provision of eight of wall-mounted panels with permanently affixed valves and controls which allows students - both new entrants to the industry and mature re-training and refresher students who are practicing engineers - to design and implement their own pneumatic circuits.

The boards were tailor-made by SMC at its UK headquarters in Milton Keynes, and were the brainchild of the company's Scottish regional centre at Cumbernauld.

These panels can be used in close conjunction with PCs so that students can fully realise the potential of the latest technology and fully simulate the operations of each of the circuits they design, as well as designing them in the most advanced way.

These in-situ panels within the college are complemented by eight SMC portable pneumatics training units, which are housed in aluminium cases.

These are a further vital part of the college's equipment in that they can be used in other classroom situations anywhere in the college and can often be found being used in conjunction with its electronic smartboard technology to enhance the learning experience.

SMC's portable units, which again feature a comprehensive range of valves and controls and a miniature air compressor, also allow for the full design and operation on pneumatics circuits and are proving completely invaluable in the college's expanding outreach educational programme.

Here, lecturers from the college are highly active in workplace training and education amongst a rapidly increasing number of client companies in the field over an increasing area of Scotland.

The programme has also proved very successful in reaching the local schools community in the field and schools regularly attending the college complement this.

SMC has also provided the college with a wealth of resource material, which includes students' information packs, overhead slides and tutor and student notes.

"Prior to SMC's help, our capability was limited being based on traditional paper and theory teaching methods.

Now, we are completely interactive and the demand from our marketplace is now such that the work we have done with our partners like SMC has been completely vindicated," said David Cook.

Because of the efforts of Jim Reilly and David Cook and their colleagues, the further potential for the department is enormous.

Because they forged such close links with companies like SMC and the college's provision is now recognised as being of the highest quality, it is spawning its own success.

Typical of the dedication and determination the department continues to display is the fact that it is the only UK college to offer complete engineering simulation facilities for engineers going to sea.

The Marine Engineering Training Centre can replicate any ship-board engine and control room circumstances and scenarios that might be experienced at sea, right up to the simulated sinking of a vessel in extreme emergency conditions.

Here again, the interface with pneumatics and SMC's equipment is of immense value, with SMC supplying a range of equipment that also includes an advanced integrated PLC controller that interfaces with a PC for SCADA control.

Such is the department's reputation - and a major coup for the college - that it now regularly has the ability to provide additional and invaluable lecturing and training provided by senior practicing engineers currently working.

These volunteers have been attracted by the quality and success of the college to happily give of their valuable spare time to help others in the industry and particularly budding engineers and they have been particularly drawn from the offshore and the fishing industries.

Other senior engineers have been attracted to become work place assessors and it is these people that the college leaders also hold up as providing the foundations of their success because young people in particular look up to the hard-edged realists from industry as role models.

"Because we are where we are, we have had to be very focused on strengthening and expanding the can-do, self-reliant community spirit typical of remote regions like Banff and Buchan," said Jim Reilly.

Taking that as its starting point the Technical Studies Department realised in the modern educational environment that it had to extend and diversify its reach and spread of educational provision and create its own opportunities to build its own market leading facilities.

That principle of self-help was logically extended as the college reached out to industry on the basis of its own impressive plans, ambitions and the credibility of those leading the department.

It is this type support from SMC that has enabled the college to raise its standards to exactly match the highest standards used in industry, added David Cook.

And as Jim Reilly summarised: "We do not have the associated glamour of some of the universities with whom we compete and the kudos they have does naturally attract a lot of high profile support and recognition from industry.

But we have shown through being focused and emphasising our assets, not the least of which is a streamlined and compact management and decision-making process that focuses solely on education delivery, that we are amongst the very best.

And our partners in industry derive so much because what we do is so much more tangible and of immediate benefit.".

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