Automation Academy Grand Opening

After months of work I am happy to announce the formal opening of the Automation Academy on November 19, 2020.

I have explained in previous posts why I created this site, in this post I mostly want to just show some screen shots of the different sections.

The picture at the top of the page is the top portion of the Dashboard, which is where members land when they enter. Below is what you see if you scroll down:

These are the major areas of the site. The primary focus of the site is:

1. Career, determining your career and life goals and examining how to achieve your objectives.

2. Education, recorded training videos on mostly technical subjects (PLCs, troubleshooting, basic electrical/data, HMIs, etc.)

3. Library, downloadable files for education and programming, aptitude tests and … whatever.

4. Community, which includes personal profiles, interest groups, communications and support forums.

The Career section is made up of Goals, where members determine what they were created to do, using Ken Coleman’s Passion, Talent and Mission philosophy, and Path, which breaks the goals into smaller Steps and Action Plans. There are lots of worksheets, tests and other resources to help in this.

The Education section contains recorded training videos on PLC programming (Allen-Bradley, Siemens and general concepts). There is a course on “Industrial Math and Data”, and much of the rest of my days will be made up of making more training videos. On the agenda is Omron, Machine Vision, HMI/SCADA, troubleshooting, and basic electricity. I plan on creating courses from the very basic to the extremely advanced. I will also be doing live events weekly.

The Library section includes all downloadable files, mostly pdfs, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents. I also plan to put several pieces of software there and actual PLC programs.

The Calendar allows members to see the upcoming events, which I will hold at least once a week. Recordings will also be made available in the archives. These will include Q&A sessions, webinars, live training, and “MasterMind” groups. I also hope to interview various specialists on different subjects.

The Community section is a full social media platform. Members can create profiles, join interest groups and participate in forums. In many ways this should be the heart of the site. I will be participating in this several times a day, but I am hoping it grows on its own.

I’d also like to thank all of the people who have helped me test the site. Philip Scruggs, Jason LaFever and Jet Leslie, your help has been invaluable. Also thanks to Jason I may have my first corporate member, Under Armour, at the beginning of the year! This opens up a lot of opportunity for group training and events.

One of my most important goals was to make this inexpensive enough for people from less affluent areas of the world to access. My base membership is only $9.99 a month which gives access to everything except for certain premium courses and programs. This should be in the price range of most people, if not it should be accessible to companies they work for.

This is the signup page I plan to release Nov. 19:

Until the end of the year I am holding a “Founder’s Launch”, where members who sign up for a year get the Gold membership for the price of Silver. This includes pretty much everything except personal coaching and training for $100 for a year! I consider it a pretty good deal in exchange for helping me get this started, by the end of 2021 I plan to have lots more premium courses as mentioned above, as well as lots of live stuff. This will be most of what I do from now on.

Thanks to all of you who have helped me on this journey so far! I hope to also have a video tour done sometime next week so you can see more!