What Windchill Courses Are Right for You?
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If you’ve looked through the PTC University training catalogs, you know there are many courses and topics to choose from. How does someone know what courses are right for them? That’s exactly what we asked Daniel Bellisario, a PTC University Technical Instructor who teaches a variety of Windchill courses.
Daniel has been with PTC for almost six years, and he’s a bit of a whiz when it comes to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). He initially joined PTC’s Cloud Services team, performing Windchill PLM installations, setting up environments, planning out architectures, etc. He worked to help spearhead the adoption of single sign-on architecture throughout Cloud Services. Through that experience, Daniel gained a very deep and fundamental understanding of how Windchill operates.
Daniel has unique insight about how to integrate various software and processes into Windchill, and he passes that insight on to PTCU students.
Keep reading to find out what Daniel shared about Windchill courses, and which ones would be of benefit to YOU.
Thanks for sitting down with us today, Daniel. To get started, can you talk a little bit about what it’s like in the Fundamentals track courses versus other more advanced tracks?
Sure. I know that Matt Kisamore explained what the Fundamentals track courses are like. We expect to do a fair amount of hand-holding in those courses. We make sure that students know what resources are available to them (like the student guide, virtual machine with their Windchill instance, etc.) and we help them learn how to get those resources open.
When we move into the advanced tracks, students know how to do those things with very little hand-holding. In those advanced courses, the questions are less about the course or general Windchill functionality. The questions start to get more specific and product-oriented.
It’s still helpful for more experienced students to take the fundamentals courses though, so everyone is on the same page. Plus, a lot of people take the whole gamut of courses. They take the Fundamentals courses so they can get the certification.
Do you find that your more advanced students are using Windchill to its fullest capability before taking courses? Do they already know most of the bells and whistles?
I talk about this in my courses, actually. Windchill has a massive amount of functionality and customization options. I can teach you the basics, the fundamentals of Windchill. For example, what's a change request? What’s the “WT Part”?
However, half the time I wouldn’t even recognize an organization’s system after their System Administrator customizes it. Every instance is different. I mean, I've seen plenty of deployments on cloud and on-prem. I’ve learned people tweak the system to meet their own needs. They might add custom code, causing entire layouts to look different. So, while someone may understand the bells and whistles of Windchill—my bells and whistles and someone else’s bells and whistles aren’t even going to be the same.
And that’s why Windchill classes can get kind of theoretical. Because, like I said, every instance is a little bit different.
That’s interesting. So, in your courses, do use some real-world examples to ground the theory of what they're learning to some sort of functional reality?
I consistently work to tie what we’re learning to real-world examples. The lesson plans themselves do this, and then I'm constantly working to bridge that gap a little further.
Do you cover some sort of industry standard best practices?
No. That’s not really possible, unfortunately.
Different industries have different standards. Since PLM is a general manufacturing solution, there’s a lot of variety in best practices. For example, best practices for a construction equipment manufacturer, like Volvo CE, are going to be different than, let's say, someone manufacturing printers, like HP.
Standards are dependent on the industry that they're in and the product that they're trying to get to market. But, I’m happy to talk through their use case if students speak up and ask questions in class.
Shifting gears a bit, let’s say someone worked their way through the Windchill Fundamentals courses, what do you think they should take next?
That depends on their goals. I’ll walk you through what someone might be hoping to achieve when they take courses from the various learning tracks.
Business Administration courses teach you how to administrate your participants, set up your groups, and the basics to object administration. These are best suited to anyone who is going to be primarily managing the system from a business perspective, such as setting up new products or managing users.
Courses in the BOM Management track are good for engineers who want to get the most out of product structure management and CAD structure integrations.
System Administration courses are specialized for anyone who is doing system management. Those who want to learn how to plan their Windchill installation, optimize the system, and set up backup and recovery procedures.
Systems and Software Engineering track courses are good for engineers who are managing embedded software that gets deployed with their products.
CAD Integration track courses are great for those who want to learn how to use the Creo-to-Windchill functionality to the fullest.
Finally, the Updates courses are ideal for those who had prior Windchill experience and are coming back to the system at a later version, so they can fill in any knowledge gaps.
And, like I mentioned earlier, plenty of people take the whole gamut of courses so they can get the Professional Certification, rather than picking and choosing individual courses or learning tracks.