Send 5 maintenance technicians on a vendor PLC course and you've spent thousands of dollars before anyone turns a spanner. Five working days off-site. Generic curriculum on equipment you may not even run. Six months later half the knowledge has evaporated because there's nothing to practise on. There's a better way: in-house, no travel budget, no Windows licence.
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The problem
External vendor courses charge flat per-attendee fees regardless of how many technicians you send. Whether you send two or ten, the per-person rate stays high. There is no volume discount for the maintenance team that needs ongoing upskilling, not just a one-off course.
Vendor training labs teach the vendor's flagship hardware in a vendor-controlled environment. Your plant may run Siemens on the utilities, Allen-Bradley on the production line, and Mitsubishi on a legacy conveyor. No single vendor course covers your actual environment.
An attendance certificate is not a competency record. When a safety incident occurs, thin documentation of what each technician actually knows and can do creates liability exposure. There is no objective record of individual skill level.
New technicians shadow senior staff until they are deemed ready. That process depends entirely on senior bandwidth, which varies, and produces uneven baselines across a team. There is no structured curriculum and no way to verify a new hire's starting level.
MerSETA learnerships and apprenticeship programmes leave PLC content in an awkward gap: too technical for classroom theory, too risky for live equipment. There is no structured, scaffolded PLC curriculum that sits between classroom and the plant floor.
The solution
Siemens, Allen-Bradley, Mitsubishi, Omron, Schneider, Delta, IEC 61131-3, and Instruction List — all in one platform on one subscription. When you commission a new line from a different vendor, your team can begin practising that vendor's dialect before the equipment arrives on site.
Motor start-stop, tank level control, conveyor sequencing, and PID loops sit alongside dedicated fault-injection scenarios that simulate the kind of failures a maintenance technician encounters in the field. It is repeatable fault-finding practice without taking live equipment offline.
The admin console lets you build a new-hire onboarding path — foundational lesson sequence through to fault diagnosis on your primary dialect — and a separate advanced path for technicians being considered for promotion. Different paths for different roles, same platform.
Six structured interview preparation tracks give technicians practice on technical questions under timed conditions. Provides an objective basis for technical competency conversations during promotion assessments — more defensible than informal evaluation.
Exportable cohort and individual reports show completion status and progress. CSV-compatible output can be incorporated into existing HR and L&D tracking. The platform does not auto-generate SETA documentation — it produces supporting evidence for your existing process.
Senior engineers can prototype ladder logic for new equipment or control modifications before touching live plant. Working through the logic in a safe environment before commissioning reduces errors and saves time during actual installation.
Building the program
A good industrial automation training program has four parts: a structured learning path from fundamentals to fault-finding, auto-graded hands-on assessment rather than just videos, per-technician progress tracking your L&D team can export, and completion certificates a third party can verify. This platform provides all four in the browser — no travel, no vendor lab.
The same four parts apply whether you are formalising an automation technician training program online for a maintenance department or building a PLC online training program for new hires — the delivery is the browser either way, so night-shift technicians and multi-site teams train on the same material without scheduling a classroom.
The admin console’s path builder sequences lessons and scenarios — including your own org-private scenarios — into an ordered route from first principles to fault diagnosis, assigned per role or per site.
Every scenario submission is run against test cases and marked pass/fail the moment a technician hits Run. Watching a video proves attendance; passing a graded fault-finding scenario proves competency.
The team dashboard shows each member’s lessons completed, scenarios completed, total attempts and last-active date, with team-level rollups — and reports export for your existing L&D tracking.
Completion certificates carry a public verification page at /verify — an auditor, a client, or HR can confirm a certificate is genuine in seconds, without contacting us.
What your engineers practise
The scenarios below mirror the situations a maintenance technician actually meets on the plant floor — motor control, seal-in interlocks, timed sequencing, and logical fault diagnosis — built and auto-graded in the browser. No live equipment to take offline, no travel, no vendor lab. The closest thing to hands-on fault-finding that does not stop production.
Pilot outcomes
Activation: can invited technicians reach a graded pass without installation, licence-server work, or booking time on shared equipment?
Evidence: can the manager see participation, attempts, completions, and last activity clearly enough to decide whether a wider rollout is justified?
Pricing
| Team size | Annual cost | Per engineer / month |
|---|---|---|
| 5 engineers | $995 / yr | $16.58 |
| 20 engineers | $3,980 / yr | $16.58 |
Vendor course figures are illustrative estimates only. Verify against current market rates before using in internal business cases. See full pricing →
What's included
Related pages
Create a free team account. No travel budget. No vendor licence. Every technician practises on the dialects your plant actually runs.
Create your team freeUse a real cohort before making a purchasing decision. Send your work email and organisation; we’ll reply with a pilot plan and only ask for the details relevant to your setup.