Brian Rogers is a Senior Surveyor with RPS Group, based on the Gold Coast, Queensland. He recently made the transition to Civilcad MAGNET Office from an old version of Civilcad, and found that with a little training from Aptella he was up to speed in no time.

“I’d used Civilcad from its very early days, back when I was working in local government,” Brian explained. In 2002, Brian’s team moved many of its projects to Carlson software, as at the time it worked better with AutoCAD.

“We never upgraded our Civilcad licences past version 5,” he said. “We still have a number of projects that are running on version 5.”

It was only when taking on a project across the border in New South Wales – which required online lodgement of plans using NSW’s ePlan service – that Brian began to look afresh at the options available 

“We looked at our options from all of the major software suppliers and their distributors and decided that the best route for us was to upgrade to Civilcad MAGNET Office with Aptella and attend some relevant Campus training courses to get me up to speed,” he said.

Brian first attended a Civilcad MAGNET Office Introduction course at Aptella’ Brisbane office. “The course was extremely helpful and practical, considering I hadn’t used Civilcad for such a long time I was surprised at how easy I found it to pick up,” he added.

A week after completing the Introduction course, Brian attended a Civilcad MAGNET ePlan Preparation Course to receive training on how to submit plans using NSW’s ePlan online lodgement service. These courses are run in conjunction with NSW’s Land and Property Information (LPI) department to ensure attendees are provided with the most relevant and up to date information about not only the software, but also the ePlan service.

“I found that having done the introductory course I was well prepared for the ePlan training – some of the other attendees went straight to the ePlan course without having upgraded to the latest Civilcad MAGNET version and learnt the new features beforehand,” Brian said.

“I think we’re all guilty of using these software platforms just enough to get us through our daily work, without ever learning about the new developments and features that are introduced,” he continued. “I certainly benefited from some refresher training to learn about the ribbons, features and shortcuts available and I’d encourage other users to do the same.”

After completing his training, Brian went onto successfully lodge his first plan online using the ePlan service. “I’m very happy with the Campus training I did and now feel completely comfortable using Civilcad MAGNET Office and lodging plans online using ePlan,” he added.