While Increasing Billable Hours and Maintaining High Quality

Clearwater, Florida, USA — “V8i training? We don’t have the budget for that.” That is a typical response that many CAD users and managers are getting today. There seem to be fewer engineers and drafters around and those that remain are needed to work on the projects at hand. Sending people out for training just doesn’t seem to be an option due to both the direct costs (including travel costs) and lost production time. Doing training in-house, while saving the travel costs, still isn’t cheap either and often consumes more valuable billable hours than management is comfortable with giving up. Yet, you’re still left with the nightmare of training users — as well as yourself — on the upgrade to V8i with all its attendant interface changes and new features. On top of that, you must integrate this new version of MicroStation seamlessly into projects and workflow without any flubs or hiccups. How do you get users quickly trained on V8i without losing valuable production time?

Have you ever had a similar “Catch 22″? LearningBay is an effective, affordable training solution that is available to your users 24/7 allowing them to get trained without heavy losses to your production schedule.

Only the Billable Survive
Delivering billable hours while producing high-quality designs is critical for both you and your organization. Fortunately, Axiom has a solution that will allow you to get the V8i training you need to keep both the quality of work and billable hours high. LearningBay from Axiom is an affordable, online, e-learning training solution that effectively trains your personnel on the specific areas of MicroStation that they need to learn or brush up on. They don’t need to waste time going over topics that they already know. And, they can do all the training without having to leave their desks!

What’s special about these courses?
They include “Learning Videos” where students watch the instructor demonstrate what is presented in the lesson pages.

Short on time? The course lessons are arranged in 30-minute segments to make it easier to get through a course on a daily schedule that won’t interrupt production hours.

Videos are included where the instructor expresses insights or tips relating to the lesson pages and entices viewers to move on to subsequent lessons.

With sample files and illustrated step-by-step exercises, students are able to strengthen their learned skills at their own pace, as well as explore freely without fear of compromising or damaging live project files.

Need a “paper trail” for all that MicroStation training you’ve done? LearningBay makes that easy because all the courses are in a Professional Development Hours format and include a course syllabus, course description, student worksheets, course objectives, a list of topics and a course completion plan.

Need an edge in getting that promotion? Upgrade your skills in V8i with structured on-line training that documents your every course completion to the satisfaction of most HR requirements.

Figure 1. To get this tip, click on “v” (video instructions), which opens a narrated video by MicroStation evangelist Mike Arroyo. Here he gives an animated instruction showing how the “Copy Manipulation” task is executed so you don’t make unnecessary copies. Multimedia features like these make LearningBay’s training courses in V8i very clear and easy to pick up.

The videos provide easy-to-follow instructions. For example, Axiom’s own MicroStation evangelist, Mike Arroyo, goes over the “Double-Click Icon” in Lesson 1 of “Manipulate Basics”. While using a manipulation command like “Copy”, Mike lets you in on the following tip: “Just double-click on an icon (works with most icons) and you’ll get a grayed-out icon [Figure 1]. Then, when you select an object to copy it, and once the object is placed, MicroStation automatically terminates the command so you don’t keep placing the same object over and over.”

LearningBay courses are designed such that beginner, intermediate and advanced materials are grouped into libraries. Each library contains related courses that cover that subject. For example, some courses included in the V8i Essentials FastStart Library are:

The MicroStation Environment — This course covers MicroStation interface basics such as the differences between dialog and settings boxes, how to dock tools and some dialog boxes along the edges of the screen, as well as the topic of when and why one would “pin” tools or boxes to the edge. These are just a few lessons in this course designed to make you even more indispensable to your peers, executives and your organization.

Interface Basics — There is more to the MicroStation interface than icons and dialog boxes. This course begins with the two types of MicroStation interfaces, dialog and toolbox, and quickly goes into task navigation. Learn how to efficiently move between drawing tasks, as well as master the Tool Settings box.

Drawing Tasks Part 1, 2 and 3 — Here are three courses written for those who need to quickly know how to draw inside V8i without the information overload. Each course explores key drawing tasks like how to insert drawing objects into the design, how to work with related tool options and how to measure distances, place cells or symbols and add dimensions to drawings.

Model Start — An introduction to modeling that shows how to create design files, how models are stored inside a single DGN, the two different types of models, as well as how to create, modify and import existing models.

Figure 2. Where do you find lesson terms and what the heck do those icons mean? Just going to the “i” icon (information page) takes you to the page which gives you all the terms used in an easy-to-understand layout so you can effectively apply your V8i tools.

By training at their own desk, on a schedule and pace that fits CAD managers and users alike, LearningBay makes the task of training far more convenient and with less expense than sending staff out for training. The training is always available to fit whatever level of expertise is needed and can be delivered whenever most convenient. This “always on” training means it can be accessed as often as users like, for review or refresher training, whenever it’s needed. “With no travel costs, no instructor costs, no waiting and no scheduling to worry about, this training makes V8i users billable faster and at a reduced cost,” says Mike Arroyo, Axiom’s world-renowned MicroStation evangelist and Vice President for Learning.

Figure 3. Clicking on the “n” icon (instructor notes) provides notes from the instructor in video format. The notes include tips and insights on the upcoming task. It is these little features that give LearningBay students an incentive to continue on to the next lesson and finish the course — to say nothing of Mike’s cool beret.

Call now!
For more information on browser based or on-site training, contact an Axiom MicroStation Consultant today! Call 727-442-7774 extension 2291, e-mail 2291@AxiomInt.com or visit Axiom on the Web at www.AxiomInt.com now!