Q&A with NDT Lecturer, Konstantinos Chronopoulos

Hi Konstantinos, can you start by letting us know a bit about your role at TWI?

As a senior NDT lecturer, my role includes the delivery of a wide range of courses as well as the development of training material, collaborating with other departments, consulting about various NDT tasks, and contributing to the section’s development with the implementation of modern technologies.

What is your career background and why did you choose to become a lecturer?

I hold a BEng (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering and Design and a Master of Science in Structural Integrity (Reliability Engineering). I been working in the engineering industry for around twelve years and have spent the last five years as a lecturer.

I began my career as support personnel in an NDT laboratory before gaining some field experience and working as an NDT site manager and assistant project manager for large projects in France, Slovenia and Greece.

This experience helped me become a QA/QC manager at an NDT laboratory as I began my BEng studies and moved to an NDT training centre, where I began lecturing.

Passing on knowledge and helping individuals to develop skills gives me great pleasure and made me want to combine my passion for engineering and teaching; bringing me to the role of an NDT lecturer. After a few years, in April 2019, I had the opportunity to join TWI where I began to deliver courses as well as MSc modules for universities.

What led you to teach at TWI and how is your experience here going so far?

My first encounter with TWI was as a student - when I took a ToFD training in the Cambridge office in 2014. TWI is one of the worldwide leaders in the welding industry and being a member of an organisation like TWI is a career milestone from a technical and professional perspective. At that stage, getting into the TWI family became one of my professional development goals. My experience with TWI has been absolutely fantastic! There is a balance between work and development too and, for me, one of the most important elements is that, through TWI, I have the opportunity to further pursue my professional development in various directions.

Can you tell us what courses have you been teaching at TWI?

I deliver a wide range of conventional NDT method courses as well as advanced ones. These include Visual Testing (VT), Penetrant Testing (PT), Magnetic Particle Testing (MT), Ultrasonic Testing (UT), Radiographic Testing (RT), Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing (PAUT) and Time of Flight Diffraction Testing (ToFD) for both CSWIP and PCN certification schemes.

How do you usually go about teaching your students at TWI?

I usually start a class introducing the triangle of the course success - knowledge, certification exams, and fun. When students join our classrooms in TWI, they should gain useful and valuable knowledge that will help them throughout their career; get sufficiently prepared for their certification exams and get doses of fun, in order to facilitate the learning process. I try to keep a good balance between the in-training classroom approach with the demanding industrial field requirements. I trust that this is one of the most valuable parts of the training as it helps the students to be better prepared for tasks that they need to undertake once they get out into the field.