Kyle McMillan is a guest blogger and the PROFINET Certification lead at the PROFI Interface Center – a PI-accredited Test Lab.
Recently, we began offering a formal Developer Training course to complement our PROFINET Certified Network Engineer curriculum. Carl invited me here to explain why.
It’s simple: I’m lazy. Really, I am; I like to do as little work as possible to move devices through the test lab as quickly as possible. My job is much easier when I can work with a customer that can easily reproduce the issues I find here in the lab, that can communicate clearly and concisely with me, and who can turn out patches that don’t raise unanticipated side effects. Having time dedicated to teaching developers about what happens in the test lab accomplishes all of those things.
I quickly realized that those are the exact same goals our customers have. In addition, they typically want to invest in in-house technology experts who can direct product maintenance and ensure a consistent customer experience across a variety of PROFINET products.
And so in between certification tests, I put together a curriculum that meets all of these needs. Unlike the PROFINET Certified Network Engineer course, the Developer training is targeted at verifying a PROFINET implementation rather than using a PROFINET system. Since we control the curriculum directly, it’s adaptable to meet each customer’s unique needs. And because we only teach the course to one customer at a time, it’s entirely confidential – students are free to ask questions about their specific PROFINET projects without worrying about their competition eavesdropping.
So that’s my story. I love to teach, I love to travel, and I hate it when a certification test stalls in the test lab. If you’re considering adding PROFINET to a product, or want to bring some team members up to speed on how to develop for a smooth test lab experience, please drop us a line.
And Carl, thanks for the bully pulpit.
– Kyle
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You are welcome, Kyle. And for you, Gentle Reader, register for a scheduled PROFINET Developer Class here or ask about getting Kyle on the road to your facility. Kyle can help you select the best development tool for your product from the myriad of tools and suppliers. See my recent post Developing a PROFINET Product for the range of tool types.