Saturday, March 10, 2012

The 'Training' Fallacy

In the printer service field, we hear endlessly about technician 'training' and technician 'certification'. There's an outfit known as CompTIA[1] that's spun quite a business out of that theme -- the PDI+ rack..., er, 'certification'.

If I may be blunt, 'training', as it's commonly understood and practised, is a worthless load of rubbish, unfit for human consumption. 'Training' is for puppy dogs, to acquaint them with the idea that they're not to shit inside the house. One cannot 'train' a technician to diagnose and correct printer troubles in any such fashion. The notion is patently false, ludicrous and an insult to technicians' intelligence.

With that little rant out of the way, I'll elaborate.

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On this blog, I post information and instruction; information and instruction in plain English that I can vouch for because I've personally verified every word of it. Information and instruction that some have found to be helpful. Here's a small example. It's a brief post I did about getting an Okidata printer's full control panel functionality restored when it's been suppressed:

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Oki 320/1 Turbo, 420/1 -- Menu Mode Unavailable

If you can't get at the Menu Mode by pressing SHIFT + MENU, it's likely because the Operator Panel Function item in the menu has been set to Limited Operation.

Load continuous forms and switch off the printer. Power on while holding SHIFT + MENU. The printer will come up in Menu Mode. Operator Panel Function is an item in the Set-Up group. Change it to Full Operation to restore complete functionality.

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Here's the response I got to that from 'Anonymous':

thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


thank for ending 2 weeks of endless searching, and im the tech savey one here

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My point here is that Anonymous did not need 'training'. What he needed was information. Given that information, he was able to solve his problem and move on.

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Conventional training, by and large, is neither informative nor instructive. It consists chiefly of shallow 'data' that leaves its recipient no more enlightened about the subject matter than before.

The PDI+ programme is accompanied by a massive PDF 'textbook' that purports to teach printer service. The book spews all manner of 'data' without ever connecting that data to the problem of diagnosing and correcting printer faults. One is told how the machines work. One is not told how the machines 'work' when they're not working right, and how they work when they're not working right is what the technician is grappling with all the time.

The textbook tells of rollers; e.g. pickup rollers that get a sheet of paper launched out of a paper tray. Consider, what is the quality that such a roller must possess in order to function reliably? It must possess traction. I did a search through the entire book for an occurrence of the word 'traction', and the word appears not once. A discussion of rubber rollers that fails to even once mention 'traction' reveals itself to be a hollow fraud.

The textbook tells of clutches. Clutches of various types are widely used in printers, and they're prone to intermittent failure as they age and wear. They tend to cause mystifying trouble symptoms. The book offers no information about clutch failure mechanisms, about how those failure mechanisms express themselves or about how to identify and isolate clutch failures.

A technician can study the textbook, sit and pass the multiple-choice exam and be certified without ever having really learned anything that would help him repair a malfunctioning printer. The training and certification testing are worthless. Actually, they're worse than worthless because they consume resources to no good effect that could could be put to profitable use.

Here's an example of the sort of printer service that all too often transpires in the field. I don't know whether the original technician on the call was PDI+ certified or not, but the outcome he got was about par for many technicians, certified or not. We see this sort of thing quite routinely.

Last week, a computer service firm brought a LaserJet 4200 to our shop that they'd tried and failed to fix. The problem was intermittent paper jams. They'd replaced many components to no avail; they'd even replaced the DC Controller. I took the right side cover off and removed the tray 2 pickup solenoid to examine it. The solenoid was sticky, as described in this post. The repair method described in that same post got the machine working reliably. The knowledge I used to effect that repair did not come from CompTIA, or from any of the OEMs.

If CompTIA means to be helpful with its PDI+ programme, it needs to rethink 'training' from the ground up, and investigate what printer troubleshooting and repair actually consist of. For starters, they could purge that word 'training' altogether, and leave 'training' to those who have puppy dogs in need of housebreaking.

Alternatively, CompTIA could just go away, and cease burdening working technicians with its demonstrably worthless 'training' and 'certification' programme.

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Note:

[1] I don't mean to single out CompTIA here. All of the OEMs' 'training' adheres to the same witless orthodoxy, and is equally a waste of time and resources.

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