Mind Your Safety

Avoid Future Extraordinary Losses

Our industry is undergoing a major demographic shift; a wave of grey-haired talent is retiring, leaving legions of younger workers that will inherit a continent full of old equipment. This is not news, but what is your organization doing about it?

90% of the workers at one of our client’s facilities have less than five years of experience; many of the remaining 10% are eligible for retirement, meaning this client may have to outsource its apprenticeship program. What future losses will this facility suffer over the next several decades when it loses literally hundreds of years of hard-earned experience?

Good judgement comes from experience (and experience often comes at the price of bad judgement). By making good judgements, we can achieve significant accomplishments; and when we avoid bad judgements, we can actually avoid extraordinary losses

At one end of the spectrum, bad judgements create rework, overtime and frustration. At the other end, they can lead to explosions, injuries and fatalities. Making good judgements while avoiding the bad ones is the difference between organizational success and complete failure.

To ensure its success, one proactive client is conducting low- and high-voltage electrical safety training for all of its North American workers, which includes self and instructor assessments, testing, interviews and skills observations. The outcome will be a precise assessment of every individual worker’s skills and abilities, and his required development needs, customized for his specific facility and the dangers within.

There’s an even greater benefit to this initiative: as this client hires new workers, it can recruit against the skill sets specific to the needs of a particular facility, and provide these workers with customized development plans that ensure they are “target-trained” for safety and effectiveness. This client understands the value of making important investments in its people, and the returns on those investments in the areas of safety, productivity and morale, with associated decreases in accidents, investigations, legal fees and fines.

Producing an expert
Several of our instructors were senior instructors in a North American utility, where they developed and managed four-year apprenticeships dedicated to high-voltage equipment, with classroom training specific to their system. Most importantly, the time between classroom sessions comprised a series of field projects of increasing complexity conducted throughout their various regions under the direction of the field supervisors. It was a cohesive and integrated development program.

This produced well-trained journeypersons (but with limited experience). Decades of observation at this utility proved that it took 10 to 12 years before it had an “expert” electrical worker. This is consistent with international research into expert systems by cognitive psychologists, where the consensus says it takes about 10,000 hours of dedicated effort to produce an expert.

In contrast, the majority of industrial electricians have apprenticed with construction firms; residential, commercial or industrial. Their four years consisted of four school sessions, each typically eight weeks in length and focusing on electrical construction with, perhaps, a day or two on high voltage.

Construction apprentices return to work and are required to be productive for their employers, with personal development a result rather than a planned and managed process. Additionally, residential and commercial construction apprentices can spend their apprenticeships with no exposure to either maintenance or high-voltage systems, and yet be hired as maintenance electricians in a high-voltage environment with the expectation to learn by experience, supplemented by occasional training.

Most industrial electricians have probably only ever received a total of 15 to 20 days of dedicated high-voltage training in their entire careers. There’s no way this process can produce experts (despite the many who feel that they are); in fact, the lack of proper development makes them, quite possibly, more dangerous.

This situation forces facilities to rely heavily on their most experienced personnel for general high-voltage system operation, and external contract specialists for testing and maintenance. This retirement trend is happening now, and the most astute companies are mapping their people and systems to determine the most proactive processes for avoiding the impending loss of hundreds of years of hard-earned experience, and the resulting extraordinary losses.

Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.