One of the first things every new hire at Corso Systems does is sign up with their Inductive Automation account and go through Inductive University. We have found it is the fastest way to get some to touch all of the various parts of the Ignition platform, and on occasion even our senior engineers will watch a video or two to get a run through how something works if they haven’t touched it in a while.

Why Inductive University?

To get the real story you’d have to ask someone at Inductive Automation to give you their side, however from our perspective it seems like the most common thing people ask when looking at Ignition, either to replace what they have to or go into a new facility is “well what sort of training do you offer?”. While Inductive offers their in person and virtual training classes, people sometimes want a quicker way to get a sense of what the software can do. “Here is the manual” isn’t a very helpful answer, so Inductive University helps bridge the gap. It provides a guided, self-paced learning experience going through all of the major components of the software. If you want to learn about something specific you can go to that part of the coursework and watch those videos, or you can go through the entirety of the Credentialed Courses, and now Elective Courses to get a more in depth run through overall design considerations and project development in Perspective.

What Is IU?

Inductive University is a series of video walkthroughs of the various parts of the Ignition platform. Everything from the gateway itself, tags, alarming, scripting, etc. all the way through overall Perspective development walkthroughs. With each major release of IU they add new classes to the curriculum to cover the new features in that release.

Beyond the videos there are quizzes for various sections to test your knowledge on that particular area of focus. Once you complete the curriculum and all of the quizzes you will receive your Ignition Credential.

Once you receive an Ignition Credential from IU it unlocks the path to the Core Certification, and once you get that it will give you access to the Gold Certification test which is currently the maximum level of certification you can reach with Inductive Automation.

How does Corso use IU?

We use Inductive University in a few ways. On starting at Corso Systems, unless you previously have obtained a credential it is the first thing we walk all of our employees through. Sign them up for an account, get them on the Premier Integrator email list, and let them run wild with the videos. Some folks will watch all of the videos and then take the quizzes, some will install Ignition and have a designer open while they do it, and some will just take the quizzes to get through IU as fast as possible to get into the Core Certification test.

After you’ve been working with Ignition for a while it isn’t out of the question to pull up IU for a refresher on a topic you haven’t touched in a while. Most times those questions will get directed to the documentation or to our internal Slack channels, but sometimes a run through a video is all it takes to figure something out.

We will also run through the new topics in each new release to unlock the Gold Certification for that release.

We have found IU is a great first step into the water for new employees, even if they have been in the industry for a while. It shows you what Ignition is capable of, and is very well put together compared to every other “Getting Started” guide on the internet.

Wrapping Up

While Inductive University alone isn’t going to give you all the tools to do an enterprise scale Ignition project it is certainly a great first step, and will likely show you something you didn’t know about Ignition even if you have been using it for a while.

It’s definitely worth going through no matter where you are on your Ignition journey, and is going to be part of your journey if you want to go Core or Gold Certified. We’ll run through that process and the benefits in a future post.