Education and Training
Education usually occurs at school and in universities. However, is that sufficient in a fast evolving field like laser technology? Surely not – continuing education is vital for maintaining and developing the competence of your technical staff. This holds for your product engineers, technicians, scientists, developers – essentially for anyone involved in developing, manufacturing, testing and repairing laser products. Quite obviously, continuing education is essential in a high-tech area, as it affects the competence, creativity and productivity of your team, also the team spirit and motivation.
And you just found out where to obtain high-level continuing education on laser technology and related areas!
| On this page: | |
| benefits of training courses | examples for possible topics |
| publicly announced courses | guaranteed competence |
| tailored in-house courses |
Benefits of Training Courses
Questions for the Management
- Which importance do you attribute to maintaining and developing the competence of your team?
- Which kind of staff training or other form of continuing education are you using already? What do you plan to undertake next?
- What do you believe to be the most effective form of training? How about in-house laser training courses?
High-tech companies can profit in various ways from high-quality training courses for their staff, as offered by RP Photonics:
- Boosting the competence: within a short time, the competence of the staff in a particular area is boosted to a much higher level. This results in increased effectiveness of the team. The achieved cost savings can substantially exceed the expenditure for the course.
- Stimulating new ideas: the intense technical discussion in a course can trigger new ideas for better solutions or new products.
- Motivating the staff: a course on an interesting topic can be very motivating for your personnel. It can strengthen the spirit of a development team and generally stimulates the interest in further learning.
- Establishing a vital contact: a training course may be the best way to check in detail the competence of RP Photonics and to get a feeling for how useful a cooperation can be for your company.
The investment into continuing education, e.g. in the form of a tailored training course, can be very worthwhile. Do you know a better way to obtain the mentioned benefits?
RP Photonics offers publicly announced courses as well as tailored courses for specific customers.
Publicly Announced Courses
Occasionally, RP Photonics Consulting GmbH holds courses in which topics of particular importance for the photonics industry are treated in depth. Typically, such a course takes place in a conference hall or seminar hotel, lasts for one to three days, and has about 15 to 25 participants. There is a mix of Powerpoint presentations and intensive discussions, and the participants obtain the content of the presentations also in the form of handouts.
Dr. Paschotta does also often teach in short courses and tutorials at scientific conferences, such as the short course SC256, "Lasers for ultrashort pulse generation", at Advanced Solid-State Photonics 2006, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, January 29, 2006, and short courses at Photonics West 2008 in San Jose, California, on Laser Beam Quality and Resonator Design for Solid State Lasers in January 2008. There will also be a short course on optical amplifiers at CLEO/Europe in Munich in June 2009.
Courses Tailored to the Needs of Customers
You can increase the competence and effectiveness of your development team with specialized in-house training courses or tutorials tailored to the specific needs and the already existing knowledge. Such an investment may pay off within a short period of time; in many cases, the additional sale of a single device, or avoiding a single mistake, will amortize the course. If the course is done for several employees simultaneously, it can be very cost- and time-efficient. Besides, this brings the opportunity to ask very focused questions and to discuss sensitive details which could not be touched during public events.
The topic, date and type of training can be agreed upon in a very flexible manor. Typically, Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta will do the training within one or several subsequent days at the customer's venue (which doesn't have to be in Switzerland!), using custom-made Powerpoint presentations.
Examples of Possible Topics of Training Courses
You may order some general laser training or fiber optics training, but note that you have the option to define much more precisely what is of interest for your team. Here are some examples for topics in the wider area of laser science and technology:
- introduction to lasers: principles of laser operation, properties of laser beams, important types of lasers
- solid-state gain media: basics, comparison of gain media, selection for concrete applications
- introduction to laser diodes: different types of laser diodes, basic properties, beam shaping
- beam quality of lasers: definition, measurements, origins, and consequences
- nonlinear frequency conversion for the generation of visible laser radiation
- introduction to fiber optics: fibers as optical waveguides, single-mode vs. multi-mode fibers, launching light into fibers, polarization issues with fibers, fiber lasers and amplifiers, novel types of optical fibers
- fiber amplifiers: physical principles, typical arrangements, important properties, modeling and optimization
- noise processes in fiber amplifiers: physical origins, characterization, effects on applications
- nonlinearities in fibers: physical principles, modeling, specific applications, and undesired effects
- design of dispersive laser mirrors
- applications of frequency comb sources: precise measurements of frequency and time, characterization of laser noise
- laser noise: types of noise, origins, optimization by design and by feedback techniques, measurement techniques, modeling
- photodetectors: various types of photodetectors (e.g. photodiodes), required electronics, limits for the sensitivity
These examples are meant to stimulate ideas. The concrete subjects, focus and level of detail can be agreed upon according to the customer's needs.
Guaranteed Competence
You personnel can only learn from a person with high-level scientific and technical skills, combined with strong didactic experience. All these requirements are ideally met by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta, who
- is a distinguished expert in laser technology and related areas,
- has conducted very successful research for many years,
- has published around 100 scientific papers,
- is continually following the new scientific literature and attends several scientific conferences per year,
- is also further learning in consulting work,
- and has developed advanced skills to extract the essentials and to present them in a very clear way on exactly the level of detail as required by the customer.
Use this opportunity to get vital know-how for your technical team!
