Southern’s Dominic Morrow looks at the role of operational assessments on today’s railway.
RSSB’s research on developing line management and leadership skills for front line staff reviewed a range of management activities related to assessing and developing operational staff, including signallers and drivers.
The research, available on the RSSB website by searching ‘T1142’, highlighted some of the great strides made in the last 25 years with competence assessments and how the industry has embraced the use of technology to assist with generating and documenting evidence. It looked at some of the challenges that assessors and managers face and highlighted some of the principles that should be adopted to develop and check our understanding of how operational staff are able to perform technical competencies, including routine and non-routine tasks.
Through a number of its investigations, RAIB has identified people who were unable to work safely, as a result of not performing core technical competencies correctly. This does not imply that those people were deliberately or knowingly negligent; it suggests that at some stage they were not being assessed as comprehensively or developed to the extent they could have been.
The safety improvements we’ve made in competence development over the last quarter-century are something to be proud of, and they’ve certainly helped operators to work more safely. The adoption of non technical skills has been invaluable, of course, but unless the person undertaking an operational task has all the relevant technical competence, the operator is more at risk, albeit unknowingly.
As an industry, while we comply with the regulatory framework, we’re less likely to achieve a reduction in operational incidents due to errors or omissions unless the assessment of core technical competence goes on improving. Assessors also need to be prepared and able to spend time with their candidates, to check their understanding and application fully. It’s all about taking a risk-based approach to monitoring and assessing at times when workload and work pressure is likely to peak.
While clipboards have been replaced by tablets, it remains a fundamental principle that the more time spent with people in their workplace, the more likely it is that the assessor will raise risk awareness and identify skills that might be in danger of fading.
Competence assessments are seldom viewed as fun activities, and few of us enjoy feedback when it highlights room for improvement or even retraining. But it is equally the case that unless we’re prepared to strive for excellence, staff and companies are less likely to benefit from a structured competence management framework.