Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing’s greatest advantage is that it creates a common understanding of your engineering drawings, and that clarity facilitates collaboration between your design, production, and inspection teams. The GD&T framework gets everyone on the same page and standardizes communication both internally and with external suppliers. Improved communication saves you time, prevents deviations, eliminates failures, and reduces material waste -- which ultimately saves you money.
The reasons to implement GD&T are straightforward, but realizing the benefits of training isn’t so simple. Paying for an online course is a waste if your team can’t find time to train, or they don’t retain the information and can’t apply it to their work.
We’ve helped thousands of companies learn and use GD&T, and in this article, we’ll explain three of the most common problems faced by our clients and ways to solve them.
Finding Time For Training
Completing GD&T training online usually takes about 15 hours per course, not counting time for review and self-study. That’s a significant investment, and it’s important to examine your company’s priorities to come up with a plan that balances the urgency of training with your needs for production.
The good news is that those hours of coursework can be broken down into manageable chunks, and online training is flexible. If you can carve out 45 minutes per workday for each person to train, your team can finish in a month.
GD&T Basics courses deliver what you need to know in just 12 hours each. Despite being 3 hours shorter per course than other training programs, our practical method ensures that your people learn the relevant parts of the standard, and how to use them in their jobs. Our lesson videos are short -- just 4-7 minutes each -- and easily digestible. Plus, our system lets folks complete the course at their own pace, and saves their progress as they go. Students can leave in the middle of a lesson to deal with work if needed, then pick right back up where they left off.
Holding People Accountable
Once you’ve set aside time for training, you want to make sure your people use that time wisely. Keeping students engaged with training and accountable for learning requires effort, but making that effort is how you get good results.
We’ve worked with all kinds of students, who have varying levels of interest in learning new things. There’s no way to control a student’s level of interest in GD&T concepts, but there are ways to monitor their progress, help them integrate the information, and hold them accountable for the lessons.
Many of our clients have found great success having managers check-in with students regularly to see how they’re getting along and to discover barriers keeping them from progressing. Others offer bonuses and incentives to motivate employees to complete training.
At GD&T Basics, our goal is to make it easy to help you keep tabs on your people so they get the full benefits of the course. That’s why we offer all groups the ability to assign a group administrator to access group progress and course status reports. The reports make tracking and rewarding their progress easy by providing:
- The student’s course registration date
- The course expiration date
- The student’s last sign-in date
- The percentage of the course that’s been completed
- All Quiz and final exam results
- The student’s course completion date
We use a final exam as a means to ensure every student has a base level of competency with the material, and certify students who score 75 or above. Some clients mandate a higher score and require their people to submit a screenshot as proof.
Retaining Knowledge and Applying It to Day-to-Day Work
The benefits of training are available to any company, but only when students retain the material and can apply that knowledge to their work. The way to move from theory to practice is to contextualize the information and simply start using it in production.
Some clients have conversations with students about how they’ll approach their jobs differently after completing the training. Others practice on real company prints and connect the lessons learned in training to actual production and inspection issues. We also recommend companies keep reference materials readily available to ensure your team is getting it right and to maintain standards moving forward.
These approaches accelerate the application of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing in day-to-day work and help teams build confidence with GD&T concepts.
At GD&T Basics, we structure our training programs to make them as useful to our clients as possible. That’s why we’re the only company that offers weekly live webinars that cover, step by step, how to apply GD&T throughout the entire lifecycle of a part, from design to inspection.
We’re not ASME Y14.5 evangelists, we’re realists. We know that you don’t need to learn the entire standard to benefit from using GD&T.
So, our method focuses on teaching the material your team needs to know to apply GD&T on the production floor in a way that makes sense for your company. Our goal is to show you the best industry practices and help your business, not to tell you to change things that are already working.
Every GD&T Basics online training course comes with a 6-month membership, and if you sign up for a course bundle, that doubles to a full year of access -- which gives your team the resources it needs to retain and integrate the course lessons. Membership includes:
- Access to our monthly live webinars and their Q&A sessions
- Access to our direct instructor hotline - help answering specific GD&T questions related to GD&T
- Access to our resource library of hundreds of recorded webinars & bonus videos
- Regular quizzes with answer explanations to reinforce lessons
- Printable lesson review handouts
- A comprehensive digital reference booklet (that’s easy to print and put in a binder)
Contact us today and we’ll provide the training and support to make sure your company reaps the full benefits of GD&T.
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.
