Competency development program is the first in the industry to reinforce conceptual and hands-on training with one-on-one mentoring from leaders in the control engineering field
Today producers and manufacturers in every sector are finding themselves in a race to manage tougher competition and increasing market uncertainty with fewer and fewer qualified people. With accelerating retirement rates combined with fewer newcomers to industry, manufacturing leaders in the future will be those who successfully make workforce development a strategic lever to sustain long-term growth. What businesses need is a predictable path to upskilling today’s digital workforce—and quickly, before talent shortages impact the industry in ways that could be felt for decades.
Emerson’s Control Performance Academy is a comprehensive control engineer development program that effectively compresses up to 10 years’ worth of relative work experience into less than 24 months of training. With a graduated curriculum in which each phase builds on the next, plus individual coaching from Emerson experts, the Academy turns novices into qualified engineers more efficiently than ever before. In addition to meeting the industry’s need for new talent, the program helps to advance knowledge transfer from seasoned engineers to new ones, all over the world.
The Control Performance Academy is unique in two ways. First, it is based on the same curriculum that Emerson uses to train its own process control experts. Second, it offers graduates on-demand individual coaching from an experienced Emerson process control
consultant to guide them as they hone their new skills in live operational settings—a benefit that no other comparable training program offers anywhere.
Through three phases of instruction — Basic Instrumentation, Fundamentals, and Specialist Training — students put the concepts they learn into practice using Emerson’s EnTech™ Toolkit, which serves as a platform for simulating, testing, and analyzing process dynamics and performance. By combining a blended learning approach with one-on-one mentoring from Emerson experts, the Academy gives trainees a solid foundation of skills and abilities around designing and troubleshooting control strategies, to optimize process performance.
Basic Instrumentation
The first phase of the Control Performance Academy course program covers the fundamentals of measurement and actuation and the basics of process control systems and optimization. These self-paced online classes are available as refresher material throughout the program using Emerson’s MyCONNECT portal, which allows students to track their progress and maintain a historical record of what they’ve learned.
Control Fundamentals
The Academy’s intermediate phase is a series of online, virtual, and in-person classes covering the essential competencies required to recognize process variability and make both operational and control system improvements. Students become familiar with basic control performance concepts, learn how to gather data to diagnose potential problems with conventional control loops, and practice loop performance troubleshooting activities.
This module includes training on the EnTech Toolkit course, Applied Modern Loop Tuning, and a new course available to customers for the first time, Control Performance Situational Awareness, which is an internal training component used to teach Emerson process control engineers the critical skill of building trust and credibility with plant operations personnel and management when conducting sensitive testing.
Specialist Training
The final, most advanced instructional phase gives students a deeper understanding of process control theories, which they can use to deploy problem solving strategies and critical thinking skills in real-world operational settings. The module includes Process Dynamics and Tuning Fundamentals, Applied Advanced Regulatory Control, and Process Troubleshooting and Optimization.
On-Demand Expert Coaching
All Control Performance Academy graduates receive up to 40 hours of remote consultation and mentoring with a certified Emerson process control engineer. Students can call or email their assigned expert to set up an on-demand web conference, which allows the Emerson engineer to view actual system data, share students’ desktops, and more. The goal is to enable students to better consolidate and test the skills they learn, and build confidence in their own judgement and capability, by tapping the deep knowledge of Emerson’s control experts as they navigate real-world situations on the job.
