How to prepare your facility for onsite thermography training

5 min read · Updated 30 July 2026

A practical course has two suppliers: the trainer brings the method, and the facility brings the conditions. When the second supplier under-delivers — wrong audience, dead panels, boundaries negotiated on the morning — the day quietly degrades into a slideshow that could have happened anywhere. The five preparations below are the facility's half of the bargain.

One — fill the seats with camera-holders.

The people who will actually scan: chargemen, technicians, maintenance supervisors. Six engaged camera-holders beat sixteen mixed attendees, because practical training is rationed by hands-on time per person. The six Monday-after outcomes are the selection test: if a nominee will never perform them, the seat is better used.

Two — nominate the practice panels early.

Real exercises need real equipment: a handful of your own boards, ideally including one with history — an old finding, a known warm joint, a board that works hard. Sharing the panel schedule and any existing scan records with the trainer beforehand lets the exercises be built around your installation instead of generic slides — which is the entire premium of onsite delivery.

Three — agree the boundaries before the day.

Live-panel training inside a working facility is routine when the rules are set in advance: who authorises access to which rooms, what PPE applies, which covers may be opened by whom, where trainees stand, who escorts. Settle it between your safety owner and the trainer the week before — boundary negotiations on the morning consume teaching hours, and improvised safety is not a lesson anyone should model.

Four — run the plant, and hand over your own camera.

Never schedule practical thermography for a shutdown or the quiet shift: no load means no heat means no signatures, and the class ends up photographing room temperature. Normal production is the syllabus. And if the team owns or is buying a camera, that unit goes in their hands for every exercise — competence lives in the specific menus, buttons and quirks of the instrument they will actually carry, not the trainer's premium model.

Five — book the month after, before the day.

The steepest forgetting happens in the first weeks, and the antidote is scheduled use: the first solo scan on the calendar within a fortnight, a named owner for the scan record, and a review of the first real images — questions included — while the course is fresh. We have written separately about making training survive the month after; the short version is that follow-through is a diary entry made before the course, not a hope expressed after it. A facility that books the first solo scan when it books the training has already decided the course will stick.