Well, I passed.
Took two attempts, I failed the first and you have 30 days to resubmit. Worked on it 5 days a week, 7-9 hours a day for 3 weeks. We got there in the end.
Of course we have a massive amount of relief…. But I have also learned a great deal about learning. I was also a very humbling experience.
As best as we can tell, I still hold the world record for a single project having the largest number of HMI windows in the Opto 22 sphere, we also had a very large part in creating the HMI windows for DeepSea Challenger for James Cameron…. But it turns out, I failed and struggled to make around 10 windows on another software package. So yeah, what I think I know and what I can do… There is a gap.
It was also interesting the way we approached this… I knew nothing about the product some 10 weeks ago. We watched their online videos and passed the on line multi choice exams. This took some 5-7 weeks. I should have keep better track of the total time I spent on all this, but didn’t.
So after watching the videos, we had still not used the product. The written exam then required us to use the product, and this is where I fell apart.
I had learned what the product can do, but not how to do it, not how to string it together and create a finished project.
We did not ‘begin with the end in mind’ as my old boss at the hospital liked to often say.
There is no question in my mind that someone who had used the product, even just a little project, would have found the exam a lot more straightforward than I.
The other complication is that I have been ‘brainwashed’ (not the right word, but you get my point) by using Opto for all these years. They have a different way of doing things than Inductive. It was hard to leave 30+ years ‘experience’ on the table and start thinking the new Inductive way.
All up, it has been a pretty stressful 2ish months. Drinking from a fire hydrant and then being quizzed about said hydrant, then being asked to make one from scratch.
The really odd thing about all this is that in my current role, it’s very unlikely I am ever going to use the product… So the question may well be, how soon will I forget?….We will see I guess.