Once a controller, always a controller...
Today I am starting an exciting journey – thanks to FoxATM and Lektor Consulting, I will take part in the "practical instructor course". For a while now I had an idea to keep my ATCO licence alive by adding a new endorsement to it, and with STDI (synthetic training device instructor) this is possible even if I don’t not have the possibility to work real traffic on a sector.
One thing is different though. All the ATCO courses I had attended previously were on site, organised by an ANSP, at the actual position, or the simulator. Lector Consulting, who are EU 2015/340 certified, provides the STDI course fully online, including coaching and the exam itself.
The duration of the course has been designed to take between three to ten days as it has 32 effective hours. So one of the good points is that if you are doing some other work, as myself, the courses can be managed in a timely manner, adapted to my calendar.
And I can indeed imagine someone having doubts about this concept, which is considerably new. I, to be honest, don’t have that, as COVID created many more possibilities for us not only to interact directly more with each other, but also – work fully remotely from any sea shore or a palm shade in the world (with a good internet connection, of course). Having in mind a safe and secure identification to match a person behind the screen with the one having the course and afterwards holding the exam, I really think this new concept is a better way of getting the endorsement of the same quality, more efficiently.
It may seem like something incredible, I suppose, so I will keep you updated with my thoughts, experiences and maybe myth breaking information from my Lektor Practical Instructor Course, so stay connected!
After the first lesson...
“No two personalities are the same thus no two instructors will be the same. It is up to you to find your ‘ideal’ instructor within”. This is what you learn in the first pages of the student-centered ATC training course. After a quick, but thorough process of my identification, I have started the course and had to answer (at first to myself) the question of what an ‘ideal’ instructor is, what kind of personality they have to have and how the relationships between the student and the instructor matters.
One of the interesting questions in the first section was about the instructors I had during my years as an active ATCO, what personalities they had, what teaching methods they offered. These and many more insights, in my opinion, raise awareness – training is not only about the plain process of following the syllabus, going through the exercises, and filling out the forms. It is also very much about psychology and human factors.
What I found really useful during this first day is that in between the sections there are tests and quizzes which make the learning process more concrete. The questions are given after the laid down information, which makes you think about what you read yourself and as I like to say – puts all that you read on the right shelves.
I am really happy to have started this training and the process only raised my motivation!
This post is the first in a series and you can read the other ones here:
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9