WHO IS OUR TRAINING SUITABLE FOR?

The industry we’re in

Wilkinson Coutts is in the business of career progression of people involved in the integrity industry. It is centred on plant in-service inspection subjects but also includes elements of new construction (source) inspection and higher-level evaluation such as FFS studies. Discussion on the techniques and limitations of NDE appear, and NDE documents such as ASME V and API RP 577 in many of our courses however we do not specifically provide hands-on training in NDE techniques.

About 75% of our training scope is related to static pressure equipment of some sort. Other items included are some types of rotating equipment, refractory and other codes and statutory regulations.

Plant integrity is as a subject cut across many industry sectors. Overall, our profile of client employer and individual training delegates divides out at about:

• Oil & Gas upstream (offshore): 35%
• Petrochemicals and refining (downstream): 35%
• Power and other process industries: 15%
• Others: small plant and process equipment:15%

Who are our delegates?

More than half of our training delegates self-fund their attendance on our courses, independent of their employer. They prefer to do it this way to take charge of their own career progression. Others are sponsored by their employer either as individual attendees on e.g. ASME or API Inspector Cert courses, or as part of in-house courses that we run on employers’ premises.

Plant inspection attracts people from a variety of backgrounds. The main ones we see however are people working as:

• NDE technicians, onshore or offshore
• OIEs, either undertraining or self-certified by their employer to UKAS RG2 staff categories
• Plant operators
• Engineer ‘insurance’; surveyors
• QA/QC 3rd party inspectors
• Mechanical technicians

Not all plant inspection jobs are the same so people from different backgrounds fit more easily into different roles

If you need further information check out our job profiles on our accompanying integrity hub JOB ROLES pages.

What about exam capability?

It is a fact of life that the formal Plant Inspector ASME/API/AICIP etc certificates require candidates to pass an exam to achieve the certification. [LINK] We understand that some people do not find this easy. Getting candidates through exams however is the business that we are in…it’s what we do. Overall, we get less than 1% of delegates who don’t possess the capability to pass the necessary exams, if they try hard enough….so it’s our job to get people through.

Do we train graduates?

We do get recent engineering graduate on some of our courses. These are predominantly from large oil & Gas companies. We discuss with them carefully however if plant inspection training is the best step for them in the early stages of their career. Graduates learn quickly but can expect to have a little ground to make up on the practical engineering appreciation and experience that is part of the plant inspection role.

We are specialist in plant integrity and inspection subjects so, in general do not provide ‘graduate only’ training courses as part of employers’ graduate training schemes.We’ve summarised various aspects to this on our Hub page Graduate World

Can I attend as a mature candidate?

Absolutely you can, mature candidates are a mainstay of our business. About 30% of our delegates are aged 40+ and they generally do well. We get some delegates into their 60s also, and the record to date is an API exam pass for a delegate aged 72. We welcome the mixture of experience and enthusiasm that mixed-age delegates bring to a training courses; it fits our training style and we get very few people that don’t enjoy the classroom interactions.

Mid-life career changers regularly attend our courses. See our accompanying article

Training language?

We are British and we teach in English (happily incorporating the British and US versions). We have presented overseas courses in 15+ countries but do require that delegates who come on our courses are able to understand and participate fully in English. Occasionally we have trained with help from translators, so we don’t rule this out, but it places limitation on the speed and depth of learning that we can provide.

Satisfied customers

We are proud of our satisfied customers, both individuals who fund themselves and employers who fund in-house courses we run at their premises. We show testimonials on our website. We also invite you to ask around the industry, or social media, and see what experiences people have had when attending our courses. If you require specific references, then let us know and we’ll provide them as far as best we can. We look forward to seeing you at Wilkinson Coutts.