Now that you’ve started exploring Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing training for your company, you have a sense of how training works and why it’s important. But you still have this nagging concern that’s preventing you from moving forward.
Maybe that nagging is coming straight from one of your supervising managers, or maybe it’s just a voice in the back of your head questioning whether GD&T training is right for your company. Maybe that voice sounds like one of these:
- “We don’t have time for GD&T training.”
- “My team’s not all on board with GD&T training.”
- “How do I know my employees will actually apply what they learn?”
- “Will GD&T training actually solve our production problems?”
- “I can’t get management or budget approval for GD&T training.”
- “I’m just looking at options. I don’t want to talk to a sales rep.”
These objections often hold companies back from getting GD&T training because they don’t realize there are simple solutions to address each of these concerns and make training a success instead of a hassle. We’ve spent years working with engineers to overcome these objections with customized training plans that defeat and even prevent these issues, so we know how to work around these potential roadblocks.
Based on our experience working through these objections and concerns, we put together this short guide to help you find GD&T training solutions to alleviate your fears.
We’re Too Busy for GD&T Training
The most common objection we hear from companies exploring GD&T training is that they’re just too busy. “We don’t have time for GD&T training,” they’ll say. “We’re way too busy to pull everyone off the floor for training.”
Well, the good news is, you don’t have you! We know you’re busy, and sometimes it’s just not possible to shut down the production line so your employees can take a few classes. That’s why there are plenty of GD&T training options with different timelines designed to fit around your schedule, so you don’t necessarily have to stop working just to equip your team with GD&T knowledge.
The key is finding a GD&T training program with the flexibility to meet your team’s schedule. As you weigh the pros and cons of various GD&T training options (using the eBook we previously sent you as a guide), consider how the time requirements of each program fit into your team’s busy calendar.
For example:
- If you need your team to be trained quickly, then maybe it’s worth bringing in a trainer for a few days of customized on-site training. Many training companies require three or four full days, but we condense it into two by zeroing in on the aspects of GD&T that are most relevant to your operation, without wasting time on the parts you’ll never use.
- If pulling your production team off the floor for two straight days is out of the question, but you still need customized training, then live online training offers the same tailored curriculum on a more flexible schedule. Online courses can be broken into half-day sessions, and this might be easier to coordinate than on-site training—especially if you need to train employees across multiple locations.
- If you’re still worried about pulling employees out of work for half-day training sessions, then let them learn GD&T on their own time with self-paced online training. By dedicating just 30 minutes a day, employees can complete our GD&T fundamentals course within a month—without ever impacting their work schedule.
- If none of these options present a perfect fit, then we’re happy to mix and match formats to create a hybrid training solution that meets your company’s needs. Maybe your employees can work through the self-paced online training independently for a few weeks, and then jump on a consulting call together as a team to ask questions about applying their GD&T knowledge to real-life production problems.
We understand that coordinating the time for GD&T training can be the hardest part of this whole process, and we can help alleviate this headache by building a customized training program around your schedule—not the other way around.
What if My Team Rejects GD&T Training?
Handling kickback and rejection from your team can be such a daunting concern that it stops you from pursuing GD&T training altogether. We get it: You’re worried that GD&T training is going to be cumbersome to implement because you’ll have to drag everyone into learning a language they don’t think they need. If you suddenly require people to sit through training without building their buy-in, then yes, you might face some pushback, and it could derail your training efforts.
One of the biggest reasons we see teams reject GD&T training is because the engineering department forces it on them without giving them any say. Companies often mistakenly assume that if engineers get trained to use GD&T, then it will just trickle down across the shop floor. That’s the fastest way to fail GD&T implementation! Imagine if your engineers started speaking French and expecting the rest of the company to pick it up. Since GD&T is a language designed to clarify communication between departments, it doesn’t do any good to only train a fraction of the team who will be using it. To make GD&T training successful, you need your whole team on-board.
To build this buy-in, you need to address how GD&T training will make everyone’s jobs easier, and ultimately help the company improve its processes to produce better quality products at lower cost. For example, instead of mandating that everyone participates in GD&T training because your corporate office (or supplier, or customer) requires it, explain how GD&T training will benefit each role in the production process:
- Empowering designers to specify dimensions more accurately than ever before, minimizing the arguments they’re having with machinists.
- Giving machinists the tools to interpret prints and make parts to spec without any question of a doubt, ultimately reducing waste and scrap parts.
- Creating guidelines for precise inspection plans, making the quality department’s jobs easier.
With your whole production line speaking the same language, your operation can run more efficiently and cost-effectively. The key is rolling out GD&T slowly to give your whole team enough time to adapt. Too often, we see engineers jump into GD&T training gung-ho, and then start throwing a bunch of symbols onto drawings that just confuse the rest of the company. Some GD&T evangelists might take an all-or-nothing approach, encouraging you to implement the entire ASME-Y14.5 standard all at once.
But as GD&T realists, we understand that you’re never going to use the entire standard, so why overcomplicate things? We customize our GD&T training programs to solve your company’s most critical needs—focusing on the rules and symbols you’ll actually apply to your prints, and skipping the concepts you’ll never use. A communication tool is only as powerful as the people who understand it, so we work with your team to make sure everyone understands how to use GD&T to make their jobs easier.
How Do I Know if My Employees Will Actually Apply GD&T on the Job?
Maybe you’ve heard horror stories of other engineers who went to boring GD&T classes that droned on about feature control frames and maximum material conditions and all 14 GD&T symbols. Then once they got back to work, they struggled to connect the dots between the theories they learned in class and the real product drawings in front of them.
What good is GD&T training if you can’t actually apply it to your job? This common concern underlines why it’s so important to find GD&T training that’s not just focused on theory, but on real-life application. Memorizing the ASME-Y14.5 standard is useless if it doesn’t help your team make better decisions when designing, machining, producing, and inspecting real parts.
That’s why we customize our GD&T training to incorporate real-world drawings from your operation to show the concepts in action. We start with a consultation call to understand your unique production issues so we can adjust the material to your situation. Then, we teach GD&T by relating the principles back to the work your employees do every day, instead of speaking in lofty terms about theories that don’t make sense on paper.
We relate everything back to our simple GD&T framework, which we designed specifically to uncomplicate the concepts behind this seemingly complex language. Our framework makes GD&T easy to understand and even easier to apply to actual drawings, because the last thing training should do is make things more difficult. We don’t just want you to remember GD&T after leaving our class; we want you to confidently relate it back to your job.
Regardless of who you choose for GD&T training, make sure they provide ongoing resources and support after the course ends. As employees transition from the classroom to the shop floor, they’ll likely have questions about applying what they learned, so it’s critical that they have access to expert advice as they put their new knowledge into practice.
After completing our GD&T training courses, for example, you’ll have access to us and all of our educational material to help you put GD&T into practice. Depending on the program you purchase, this access could range from two months (after on-site training) or up to one year (with online training). Plus, we also offer weekly webinars and customized coaching calls to help your team directly relate GD&T concepts to your production line. Bottom line: we’re not going to throw you from the nest and hope you fly—we’ll keep working with you until you’re comfortable using GD&T day-to-day.
Reach out today to learn how to get GD&T training for your team
How Do I Know That GD&T Training Will Actually Solve Our Production Problems?
One of the biggest fears that managers have before making any investment like this is that they’re going to spend the money and not see the return. “Is this really worth it,” they wonder, “or is this just a waste of time?” In other words: “Is GD&T training really worth the cost?”
We get it: You don’t want to purchase a program that’s not going to show results—just like you can’t justify the expense of a gym membership if you’re not getting fit. Let’s face it, the gym can be an intimidating place if you don’t know how to use the equipment to get the results you want. But if you have a personal trainer and a customized plan, you’re more likely to meet your goals. The same goes with GD&T training: just think of us as your personal GD&T trainers helping you whip your engineering prints into shape by using the right GD&T tools in the right way.
Whether you train with us or not, make sure you’re working with engineering experts who don’t just specialize in the standards—but in applying the standards to actual parts and real-life situations. Ideally, you want to train with GD&T pros who have experience designing, machining, and inspecting parts using Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing.
After all, you’re not just buying GD&T training; you’re buying the results you get from training. To justify the cost of training, you have to consider how much more time and money you’re already spending to battle problems that GD&T training could prevent, such as:
- Designing tolerances too tight, driving up product costs
- Producing scrap parts and unnecessary waste
- Resolving disagreements about uncertain dimensions
- Inspecting parts inconsistently because you’re not sure how to read the print
Simply throwing GD&T onto your prints won’t make these problems disappear. But understanding how to use GD&T effectively to produce parts with less waste, more clarity, lower costs, and more efficiency—that’s the main objective of our training.
I Don’t Know if I Can Get Management or Budget Approval for GD&T Training
We often hear this concern from engineers who are trying to convince their managers to green-light the funds for GD&T training. Usually, when they’re worried about getting approval from management, it’s because their managers have some of the same objections we’ve covered here already:
- “We’re too busy. We don’t have time to pause production for training.”
- “We don’t have buy-in from the whole team. The machinists don’t think they need it.”
- “Will employees actually be able to apply GD&T?”
- “Will GD&T training really improve our operations?”
- “Is GD&T training really worth the cost?”
Obviously, your managers want to see results from their investment in GD&T training. Frankly, so do we. We’ll work with you to create a customized solution to make GD&T relevant to your company’s goals and processes, solving your unique production problems.
I Don’t Want to Talk to a Sales Rep
Maybe you’re just exploring the options for GD&T training, and you don’t want to get on the phone with a pushy sales rep who’s going to hound you for business. Who would? Look, we’re engineers, too, and we hate talking to salespeople just as much as you do. That’s why we don’t want to pitch you any products or programs. We just want to help you solve your production problems by making GD&T easy to integrate into your operation.
During our call, we’ll take time to learn about your operation to help you understand how GD&T training can help—if it’s even right for you at all. Our goal is not to sell you; our goal is to help you see how GD&T training will improve your production—whether you partner with us or not.
Need help navigating your options for GD&T training?
We’ll answer all your questions to help you make an informed decision,
without pitching or pushing a sale. We promise.
We want to help you figure out the best approach for getting your team using GD&T. We are here first to help - not sell, so let us know how we can assist your team to get started with GD&T Training.