We have a couple of short weeks upon us soon with the bank holidays for Easter . It does mean we are a bit restricted to offer some of the longer courses we run . We have a little time to spare so it is a good time for anyone to do the 17th Edition exam only here , which we hold on demand at a price of £125+VAT. After that we are straight back with another Advanced OTDR course on April 24-26 . Meanwhile we wish everyone a Very Happy Easter.
We are getting an increased demand this year for the Advanced OTDR course here at Lucid . We are now running the next course on April 24-26. You are welcome to bring along your own equipment if you wish . Please contact us for details .
As part of our drive for continued improvement of our courses and facilities, we have a new and rather large bean-to-cup coffee machine, complete with milk foamer, arriving tomorrow.
This will make expresso, americano, latte, cappuchino and whatever else our trainees might want.
If you’d like to be one of the first to try these, then we still have a couple of places available on the courses running next week from 27/3/2017 at Lucid –
“Advanced Fibre Characterisation Engineer (Level 3 Certificate)”, “Advanced OTDR Testing (Level 3 Certificate)”, and
“City and Guilds 3667 Unit 2&3 Combined Fibre” 
We have just received 21 new Certificates from Open Awards – which means that there are now more engineers with a UK level 3 Certificate in Advanced Fibre Characterisation in Denmark, Greece, Finland, Sweden, USA, Netherlands, England and Wales! We still have a couple of places available on our public course 27-31 March at Lucid for anyone who wants the ultimate advanced fibre testing qualification – contact us at www.lucidos.co.uk
We have just two places left on our next Advanced OTDR course here at Lucid . This course is certified by OpenAwards and is designed for managers and engineers who are required to accept, interpret or understand OTDR traces, also maintenance staff who use the OTDR for fault finding .
A basic understanding of optical fibres is required for this course .
Please contact us for full details .
We still have a couple of spaces available on the City&Guilds 3667 Units 2+3 fibre course here at Lucid this month , March 27-31 . Please ring for details .
This is Lucid’s original full 5-day advanced testing course, run by John Colton, our technical director who is an acknowledged world expert on advanced testing of fibre networks, and wrote the first OTDR and PMD courses in the industry 20 years ago.
The course carries two formal level 3 certificates from a UK licensed awarding body. The location is Lucid Training Centre in Garsdale, Cumbria LA10 5PE
The course is modular, starting with the “Advanced OTDR Testing” module over the first 3 days, followed by the “Advanced PMD and CD Testing” module over the last two days.
Due to corporate commitments we don’t often get the opportunity to run this as an open course, so please call or email as soon as possible if you’d like to reserve a place.
Recently we have seen quite a few adverts for training courses, which use various terms such as ‘certificated’, ‘approved’ and ‘recognised’. This can be rather confusing, as anybody can ‘certify’, ‘approve’ and ‘recognise’ anything they like. There is no protection for these terms so people selling dodgy products can use these descriptions as much as they like. You may as well have a piece of paper from your Mum! In the UK this has been partly addressed by the licensing of awarding bodies:
*Licensed awarding bodies*
In the UK, the government has set up the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) as the overseer of national qualifications. The QCA then licences awarding bodies to develop and oversee qualifications and awards in partnership with industry and academia. Licensed Awarding Bodies such as City & Guilds, and Open Awards, spend a lot of time and effort not only on developing and maintaining qualifications, they also oversee that assessments for their qualifications are carried out properly, typically by sending an independent External Verifier out to visit their approved training providers, witness practical assessments and check through paperwork. Checks and inspections of approved centres vary but are at least annual.
*Training Companies*
Any company, organisation, or indeed individual can issue a certificate, but unless they are an official awarding body licensed by the QCA, or a similar national authority in another country, their certificate is not a formal qualification. This does not necessarily mean that these certificates are worthless, since the reputation of some companies can mean that the value of a company certificate is widely recognised even though it’s not an official award.
But – if it’s a qualification or certification you’re interested in, then do check the status of the awarding body, and the relevance of the ‘award’ they offer.
A reminder that the threat from working in confined spaces should not be forgotten or underestimated with these two tragic incidents from the USA and Australia . Here is a tragic accident: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-38988928 This follows one in the US earlier this year: www.bradenton.com/news/nation-world/national/article126948324.html
Due to increased demand we have scheduled another AOTDR course here at Lucid , March 27-29 . This is a three day course leading to a Level 3 award , certified by OpenAwards. In the same week we have a two day CD/PMD course , March 30-31 . Please ring for more details.
Due to a last minute cancellation we now have available spaces on the next City&Guilds 3667 Units 2+3 Internal and external Fibre course . It is running here at Lucid Training Centre in Cumbria , February 27-March 3 . Please ring for details .
The Lucid office has been busy on the travel websites today: we’ve booked 3 return flights, car hire, airport parking, and two return ferry tickets, and arranged 2 shipments of equipment – and that doesn’t even include travel for our upcoming trips to Bermuda.
Lucid have been asked if we can put forward details of any of our ex-trainees who have off-shore certificates and would like some contract work.
Pre-requisites are: off-shore certificate and trained/certified by Lucid Optical Services Ltd. If you’ve not been trained and certified by us at Lucid the employer is not interested so this is strictly for our trainees.
Either phone the office or email your details to us at Lucid and we’ll send these on to the employers representative.
Congratulations to all the Community First Responders (CFRs) from Garsdale, and two from Dent and Sedbergh, on passing their annual assessments today. The assessments, taking 30 min for each volunteer CFR, were hosted by Lucid in support of our local CFR team.
With our idyllic rural location, speed of access to emergency services is not what it could be, so it is potentially life saving to have these local CFR teams who can reach patients to administer CPR, defibrillation and oxygen before the ambulance arrives.
And a happy New Year to you from all of us at Lucid
As usual, we are not sending Christmas cards but are donating to charities instead. This year our chosen charities are the Air Ambulance, Garsdale First Responders, the “Garsdale Red Squirrel Group” which helps preserve one of the last pockets of red squirrels left in England, and finally a new charity, “Rebuilding Nepal” – following the earthquakes, the region is still struggling with instabilities and landslides which could carry on for years.
Just post a comment with your preferred choice below or on our facebook page at www.facebook.com/LucidOptical.
At the FIA (Fibre-optics Industry Association) AGM on 5th December 2015, Mike Gilmore stepped back after many years service as Technical Director of FIA – the end of an era!
Lucid’s John Colton was then elected as the new Technical Director, after 13 years as a FIA director with responsibility for training and qualifications. John is looking forward to carrying on Mike’s work representing the fibre optics industry in UK and looking after the interests of all the FIA members.
Thanks to Mike Gilmore for all his work for the FIA, and congratulations to John Colton.
We are looking for an additional trainer for Lucid, starting early 2016. As for all our trainers, the main requirement would be plenty of real-world experience of both fibre optics and copper comms cable installation in various environments.
You would not necessarily need previous training experience; if you have the right industry experience and aptitude then we can teach you this.
If you are interested then send us an email with your details through the link on the right, or our contact page.
A client is looking for a qualified fibre test engineer for a permanent position.
If you’ve done our Advanced OTDR Testing and ideally also our PMD and CD Testing course then please send us your details. We can provide more information and will be happy to put you in touch.
Please note, we are unable to help if you not Lucid trained.
Not only have we had a really busy start to 2015, but we have already received more positive feedback from trainees than most companies hope to get in a whole year! Here is a comment we received by email after the course:
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for the AOTDR course I have attended this week . John our instructor was quite brilliant on his course. It is one of the best if not the best training environment I have had instruction at. With it being done in a very relaxed atmosphere made it easier to concentrate and to follow the course content. I will be recommending Lucid to all my contacts. Also I would like to thank all the staff for their friendly approach to the trainees-again a great impression, thankyou.”
All the comments can be found on our freshly updated comments page
LaserBee 6.0.0 is now available. This version of LaserBee embodies the latest version of IEC 60825-1 released in May this year and just adopted as a British Standard BS EN 60825-1:2014.
Although the outward appearance of LaserBee is much the same, a major re-write has been required to incorporate all the requirements of the new standard. For example:
When presenting its results, LaserBee explains its actions with reference to the published standard.
Why not request a demo version now to see it in action?
You can also buy it on-line.
