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Using Technology to Deliver Competence, by Nick Garland
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- 3. www.assure360.co.uk What is Competence •Health and Safety Executive (UK) – Sufficient knowledge of a task and the risks involved – Training alone is not enough • European Commission – Behaviour, skills and knowledge – Learning over a lifetime
- 4. www.assure360.co.uk How to UnderstandCompetence • A Good Competence Scheme: – Measurement by observation – Continuous / on-going exercise – Skill gap – Inform training
- 5. www.assure360.co.uk The Challenge • Frequentobservation • Big data • Inadequate tools • Internal
- 6. www.assure360.co.uk The Solution • Clouddatabases • Tablet applications
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Editor's Notes
- #4 What actually is Competence and why is it difficult to measure and deliver? In the UK, The HSE state that Competence is sufficient knowledge of a task and the risks involved along with the experience and ability to carry out their duties. They also say that a training course is not sufficient to ensure competence. In a wider context, the European commission stated in 2000: Competence is no longer just one aspect of education and training; it must become the guiding principle for provision and participations across the full continuum of learning contexts A bit wordy, but we can take from this that Competence develops over time. Individuals develop their competence through a mix of initial training, on-the-job learning, instruction, assessment and formal qualification. Or put another way, Competence is the behaviour, skills and knowledge needed to undertake a task safely and well. It is learning over a lifetime. Competence is therefore something to strive for, as without it the workforce has by definition insufficient knowledge of the task at hand, the risks they are being exposed to and potentially ingrained behavioural issues that could affect others. In such a safety critical area as asbestos the absence of Competence could be catastrophic to the worker, their colleagues, the general public and their families at home. And this is before we think about the reputation of the employer.
- #5 If the Competence of an individual is critical to how well he or she performs in a safety environment. It is also critical to measure it so that we can develop strengths and eliminate weaknesses. What makes a good competence scheme - or indeed a bad one? If the Competence of an individual is critical to how well he or she performs in a safety environment. It is also critical to measure it so that we can develop strengths and eliminate weaknesses. What makes a good competence scheme - or indeed a bad one? A good scheme: • Measures the behaviour, skills and knowledge of all individual employees • Must be a continuous exercise over their entire career • Identifies the skill gap between where the employee is and where you / they want to be • Delivers this information in such a way that we can identify and strengthen or eliminate traits as appropriate
- #6 And this is the problem - for a system to understand the totality of an individual’s Competence and produce meaningful results we need a huge amount of direct assessment. The assessment must be in the natural environment to capture normal behaviour and the results need to be in an accessible format. I have been delivering competence systems for 10 years and I can tell you this is a mighty big challenge. And the solutions to date have largely been unsatisfactory. One-off exams, even ones including practical assessment only capture a snapshot – and delegates can often perform well for an examiner. Such a system will not identify the employee that knows what to do, but decides not to or the one prone to 'bad days'. Paper audit systems were so unwieldy as to only really present (at best) team wide assessments. With the introduction of spreadsheets we practitioners were given a big boost. However in terms of asbestos, we could still only reasonably deliver high-level assessments for Supervisors and Project Managers, brushing over the detail that is critical for developing training needs assessments. They also ignore operatives (the vast majority of the workforce) as individuals. For a system to genuinely promote strong safety cultures it must also be driven largely by an internal team. External assessors, whilst giving a valuable check on the health of the system – can often be perceived as a police force, perversely harming the H&S culture
- #7 However in the last few years new tools have become available allowing completely comprehensive understanding of the whole workforce – from the most senior project manager down to an individual trainee or temporary agency worker. The systems now available give understanding of the organisation as a whole AND the individual. Cloud based databases, coupled with well designed tablet applications give us easy data gathering tools, coupled with powerful engines to crunch the data for us. Presenting immediately accessible, useful information to deliver real change. An effective, flexible system can also be re-tooled so it can cover a whole host of industries and sectors. As I say I have been designing competence systems for many years, and the following demonstration is the product of more than two decades of experience, coupled with the technological advances of the last couple of years. I have designed Assure360 to deliver competence, in a straightforward and accessible manner. The system concentrates on the UK asbestos removal industry, but it can just as easily deliver competence in other sectors or countries.