The Faraday Centre Reviews

Seriously, this was the worst course I have attended in my 40 year career in engineering. We should not be invoiced for this; we lost 4 man days and learnt almost nothing. There was not enough preparation and we had only finished the induction by the time we took first break at 10am. The course materials were poor and must surely have been written by someone with no experience of ROV or subsea vehicle systems. The equipment did not function in the practical area. There was no structure to the course at all. The instructor clearly had plenty of electrical experience but in power stations or DNO environments, NOT in marine, especially subsea vehicles. Any questions I asked were skirted around, I suspect because of lack of knowledge in the specialist area.

This course added zero value. The course has no structure and isn't focused on ROV's or the marine industry. The notes are clearly re-purposed from power stations. The materials also didn't cover the extremely vague assessment questions at the end of the course. It was clear that the lecturer had electrical experience but not relevant to ROV's or marine industry. We spent more time focusing on the site induction (that we'd already done online) than any electrical switching. The switchgear didn't work during the practical and the training materials weren't suitable. Nice lunch.

this course wasn't good unfortunately. the preparation seemed poor and the course structure was all over the place. we had an induction and touched on the electricity at work act (which didn't seem relevant) before lunch. in reality, we had an hour discussing test equipment and proving dead without a clear method of doing so, however the switchboard wasn't working and the notes weren't clear. unfortunately, I don't feel like I've gained anything from the course.

Norman is very knowledgeable and demonstrated great experience. The course contents it’s not very substantial. A lot of critical information left out from the RWE OSR’s. I think the two companies need to compile something better. Some of the slides do not read correct (poor grammar). Food choices were poor. Food order sheet submitted before the course but ended up not going through to the kitchen.

Issues with content supplied by company, trainer very good

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...

The course was not specific to the job role that we do and the content has no relevance to our role. The course should have more content that we can use in our job.

The course printed materials contained the information I wished to learn, however the tutor was not knowledgeable enough to do anything except show the power point slides. The tutor did not attempt to explain the slides, or even read them out, merely presenting them on a screen. The tutor did not attempt to cover all the modules in the course materials, and would have terminated the course at the beginning of the second day except that we requested to look at Harmonics. (which he could not explain, merely showing the power point slides). VERY disappointing course; would have been good if the tutor matched the materials. The tutor was pleasant enough, but was not the right person the deliver this course.