Tutoring objective

Provides the learner with the experience of going step-by-step through specific drawings related to their employment and acquiring the ability to extract the information they will need.

Who will benefit from this tutoring

• Account managers and salespeople who need to find opportunities from bid packages and drawings for projects.
• Maintenance and field service staff encountering new kinds of blueprints they need to use.

Areas of subject assistance

• Understanding what each specific drawing is meant for.
• How to find and deal with the inevitable mistakes that will be on drawings.
• Awareness of how drawings are organized in bid packages
• Knowing what the MasterFormat is for architectural designs and similar organizations for other markets.
• Perspective on how and why blueprints are useful in various aspects beyond just construction and fabrication such as service, maintenance, customer applications, supply chain, facilities, finance, sales and planning.
• How to use drawing to infer useful information that is not explicitly specified in the drawing set such as:
• What the process maturity of the organization is. This is almost always shown in the quality of their drawings.
• How technically advanced the organization's staff is and how well they cooperate can be estimated by the level of cross-functional detail in the drawings.
• What likely next round of business will be can often be assessed based on what is missing from the current bid package.
• How stable the organization is likely to be over time is especially important for selecting the credit level to be given. It can give a level of reality that is much harder to fake than balance sheets. Haphazard drawings indicate a disorganized organization that will be unable to control unplanned events from negatively affecting their business.
• What is absent from a bid package that could be an opportunity for the learner to provide.
• Dealing with messy, crowded, sloppy, and obfuscated drawings.

Areas of general assistance

• Assessment of current knowledge and capabilities.
• Determination of what the learner really needs (and what they most probably do not need).
• Estimate of what can be accomplished in the available time allocated.
• Guidance on future learning opportunities. Especially about all the high-quality industrial education that is now free or near-free.

What is Unique About This Tutoring

Existing blueprint reading course tend to focus on the myriad symbols, line types and views found in blueprints. The idea is that if you can memorize all the different symbols, lines and views and their meanings then you can "read" a blueprint. This is a difficult approach for the learner and also not a very effective one.

Instead with one-on-one tutoring the learner will choose the specific blueprints they are having trouble with and we will go through them at the pace and comprehension level the student can handle. The learner will still get the know the symbols, line and views in the context of a drawing that has meaning to them such that retention of the material becomes much easier and more effective.

Existing blueprint reading courses and textbooks almost always show nearly perfect drawings from which to learn and this can be very helpful. But reality is usually not that nice. Unfortunately, more drawings that you will encounter in your career will be deficient and sometimes even obfuscating. You rarely can just throw up your hands and walk away. Time will be spent on learning how to deal with the frequently occurring "less than perfect" drawings. More effort will be required to decipher these nightmares, but there are methodical ways to approach the problem and get at least some results.

Besides being able to read the lines of the drawing itself, insight will also be given on how to read between the lines of the drawing so as to figure out intangible information about the people you are dealing with.

Blueprint Used for Learning

It will be best if the learner has blueprints from their own work to used in the tutoring. However, if the learner only knows the general type of blueprint they will encounter but does not have examples of their own we can find ample blueprints applicable to their employment from the large selection available online as well as from technical manuals. We might also be able, with some discussion, to figure out other ways to find good examples from their own employment environment.

Example Blueprint Types See Examples of Technical Illustrations and the Places they are Used

• Plant Floorplans
• Plant electrical & plumbing plans
• Machinery mechanical drawings
• Pneumatic and hydraulic schematics
• One-line electrical diagrams for 3-phase systems
• Electrical schematics
• Fabrication diagrams for industrial control panels
• Ladder logic diagrams
• Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID)
• Process Flow Diagrams (PFD)
• Electronic Schematics
• Printed Circuit Board layouts