BUP – Basic Electrical Upskilling Reviews

Did not learn one thing on this course! The course isn’t worth 1p never mind the £2000+ my company was charged! 90% of the course was PowerPoints with lecturer just reading through them for hours! Lecture asked us to take extended breaks to waste time. When asked questions the lectures answer was always the same “I don’t know I worked on HV not LV” which is not helpful! 1 day we spend 6 hours wiring in a single timer as lecture “hadn’t a clue how to do it” even after asking for help himself and then being shown by 3 other lectures still no clue! The few practicals we did were not even planned out and the lecture didn’t know how to do them!!! As a group we would get stuck and ask him for help to be replied with “honestly guys I haven’t a clue”. How is this the environment for learning! The course is about upskilling but PowerPoints don’t increase a persons skills. When fault finding the lecture would pull the wire out and jab it into different terminals to see how it would react but this is not realistic to be doing in our jobs as this would cause tripping, blown fuses and huge downtime! The lecture when informed by all 4 of us that he wasn’t teaching us at all and we all don’t understand the diagram he replied with “you don’t need to understand it as you don’t need to be a good electrician you just need to be a lucky one”. The lecture also said that we shouldn’t use multimeters but instead got us to test machinery with equipment from the 1960s not realistic for a modern work environment. The lecture also spend the last 3 days sitting at his desk booking a stag do on the PC taking the diagram we needed to view OFF the big screen to display his Germany stag do flights. When we informed the lecture and another lecture in the room that this course was £250 a head so £1000 a day for 4 of us they both couldn’t believe it and began laughing hysterically. All in all this ‘training’ if you can call it that has been a total waste of time and money not 1 thing learned and no skills improved now all 4 of us are having to go back to work after 2 weeks with our work gaining nothing from the money invested!

The course is not worth £2100 + vat. The lecturer knows absolutely nothing and had to ask for help from 3 other trainers and still couldn’t help us set the circuit board up, they thought it was hilarious that it was costing our company £1000 per day for the four of us. Him showing us what to do was jabbing wired in all over the circuit until he found the correct terminal, which obviously I couldn’t do without causing serious issues back at work. In the 2 weeks I was at the faraday centre he was telling us to drag out our breaks and get stuck in traffic to waste some of the day as it’s death by power point and he’s sick of it. He is a hv experienced electrician and quoting him he knows nothing about lv but is trying to give us training, which is an absolute joke. We have learned absolutely nothing but according to the lecturer you don’t need to know anything as you don’t need to be a good electrician just a lucky one. We were told to just fill the time and do what we wanted one day in the second week as he was sick after doing 200+ slides in power point presentations which isn’t surprising as the whole first week and 3/4 of the second week was power points. For most of the fortnight i was there the lecturer was on his phone or on his computer booking a holiday to Germany. I could go on and on but I’ve wasted enough of my life on this to go back to work with no extra skill at all.

This week was all power point presentations some had far too many slides and basically no practical I didn't feel like I learnt anything this way and there wasn't a proper explanation to what was being shown... Some power points we where told just to read the book of notes ourselves while lecturer was scrolling through his phone there was also topics off the course skipped and put lecturer said he does HV not LV so we didn't learn anything really involving LV which is what we mainly needed for our jobs no one can learn this way even some questions asked couldn't be answered for the most part...