Having attended a traditional classroom setting for my NDT education, I experienced the value of direct instructor interaction as well as the benefit of being able to put my hands on the various types of equipment. Although I attended a well-known NDT college for my education, it was not what a person would consider as a “traditional educational format.” For the most part, the students navigated their way through the courses by themselves, some learning faster and some at a slower pace. Instructors had no structured lectures, but they were available when needed by the individual student. Students came and went from class as they pleased depending on their personal learning pace, completing quizzes, watching video lectures, taking final exams, and performing hands-on tasks with various pieces of equipment.
After graduation I started my career in NDT on the North Slope of Alaska as a radiographer’s assistant where I soon found that all the classroom training, equipment familiarization, and knowledge that was imparted to me at college was just a small base of what I really needed to know. This is when it became clear as to why the NDT training requirements are made up of two parts, classroom/theory training followed by on-the-job training (OJT). I realized that the classroom/theory training was to give me an in-depth understanding of the physics of the various nondestructive testing methods and the much larger part of the training format, OJT, was to provide me with the practical skills to do the job on a day-to-day basis.