Part one: Laying the foundations

Over the years I have visited dozens of sites and employers around the world. Many of them felt they had their employee’s competence fully under control. However, when looking a little deeper, many had what we will call a ‘training records’ system, rather than competence management system.

What’s the difference? A training records system is usually a list of names, the date they received specific training, and the date by which that training needs to be refreshed.

By contrast, a competence management system goes far deeper: it illustrates how competence is checked after the training is completed, both in the training environment and directly in the workplace. We’ll look at this in more detail later on.

This important distinction became clear to me was in the early 1990s. The regulator’s auditor was on our site and was being hosted our unit’s training leader. In the control room, the asked the operator on shift to “prove to me this person is competent to deal with this unit when it falls into its worst emergency scenario”.

The supervisor replied: “He’s been doing this job for 12 years. He has an NVQ level 3 in Control Room Operations. He did a four-year apprenticeship. He has had firefighting and emergency response training.” The auditor was unmoved, saying: “That’s all well and good – but I asked you to prove to me that he is competent, not to list his training and experience.”

This is now very much the focus of our regulators: being able to demonstrate competence. There a number of ways of doing this – so, where to start Let’s start with legal and mandatory compliance.

Legal and Mandatory Compliance

When we talk about legal compliance, we mean those activities our staff must perform to abide by training requirements enshrined in law, which is enforced by industry regulators. For example, if we staff drive forklift trucks they must have formal training to do so by an approved training supplier, which must be refreshed periodically. Or perhaps we have employees who work on process units where hydrogen sulphide may be present – and so we have a legal obligation to train our staff in H2S awareness.

Meanwhile, mandatory training requirements are usually standards set by the specific employer. Examples include the site’s drug and alcohol policy, local emergency response training, and so on.

So how do we manage this? The starting point is create an employee database which includes their roles and their individual legal and mandatory training requirements. This would include the last time they received each training and the date of any refreshers needed to maintain compliance. In a small unit this may be part of someone’s administrative role, although on larger sites it can even be someone’s designated full-time job.

With any important activity, metrics are crucial: they help make management fully aware of compliance for the site as a whole. So what can we measure?

Firstly, the site or its departments are unlikely ever to be 100 per cent compliant – this is because people can forget to attend refresher training, they could be off sick at the time or simply not available due to operational needs. But using our database, we can easily give a percentage compliance level for whole sites and their constituent departments. This information should be shared with the leadership team on a quarterly basis as part of the performance dashboard. If safety and training teams want help in pushing the compliance agenda this is the best way I know.

Secondly, all leadership teams watch the bottom line and hate wasting money. Again, using the database and training staff it is quite easy to determine how much money was wasted in training which wasn’t attended by site and by department. Experience has shown this can be very powerful in pushing the agenda.

Metrics like these will help us in our ambition of the site being 100 per cent compliant with its legal and mandatory training requirements.

Other Training Requirements

There are two other categories of training which must be considered:

Firstly, technical skills. This where we consider skills enhancement at the task level. We may simply want to develop people further by adding new skill capabilities to their job roles or we may be introducing new equipment that they are not familiar with. Examples include replacing a compressor with a new one from a different manufacturer during a shutdown – which means training for those who use it or maintain it – or training people in bolt tensioning techniques who have not done this before.

Secondly, support skills (sometimes referred to as ‘soft’ skills). Examples of this include IT skills, problem solving techniques, and working effectively in a team.

So how do we capture all this? My favoured approach is for all employees to have a personal development plan which is agreed with their supervision and put together towards the end of quarter four. This should have a deadline for submission by mid-January latest and include all three categories of training needs. These plans should be reviewed between supervisors and their teams at least quarterly.

By doing this it is easily possible for the training and HR teams to cost it out and provide the leadership team with an estimate of how much all the sites annual training requirements will cost and then they can make decisions about resources required. This method also then makes it possible to have a metric around how much of the required training has been delivered on a quarterly basis.

Moving on we now need to look at how people learn and what good training looks like. Then we can move to close the loop and finally look at the issue of being able to demonstrate competence particularly in the Legal and Mandatory and higher risk skills training.

How Do People Learn?

There are three main principal schools of learning psychology: cognitive, behavioural and experiential. These learning style preferences are present in all of us. But usually, one of them will be a stronger preference for an individual than the other two. Let’s consider each in turn.

• Cognitive – People with a preference for cognitive learning are likely to read documents such as procedures, method statements and manufactures manuals, before doing anything else.
• Behavioural – Behavioural learners are happiest when able to watch a demonstration before taking the task on. They won’t readily volunteer first, preferring to wait until others have made a start.
• Experiential – Finally, those who prefer experiential learning are those who just want to jump in, have a go and see if they can do the task without worrying about likely success.

But remember, we all have the three learning styles to varying degrees. For example: you get a new PC for your birthday. The cognitive learner will study the instructions thoroughly before doing anything else, the behavioural learner will ask someone who knows about computers to help them get going, while the experiential learner will get everything out of the box, switch it on and see what happens.

In light of this, think about yourself – what is your main learning style preference? We’ll consider what effective training looks like in part two.

Cogent Skills has been supporting high hazard industries with their Process Safety requirements for more than a decade. For an informal discussion about how we can help your business, contact our team on 01325 740900 or at [email protected].