1994 Q6 Staff competencies

[ricky]

Hi All,

I was reading a IRSE study guide for mod 1 and at the bottom of the page was a question on staff competance.

"How should the competency of staff employed to work with safety equipment be assured?"

Usually I would avoid these single sentance questions as I'm always worried I'll drift off topic. However this one made me think, I thought I knew a bit about managing competance but then I only managed a page of typed answer. Also the structure is quite poor but thats cause I didn't really know what they wanted or where i was going. I have uploaded my answer more it show the points I thought of rather than the answer it's self.

I was suprised this hasn't been attempted on here before and would be interested to see any ideas/answers people have.

Thanks

Rich

[Jerry1237]

Ricky,

I agree partially with your answer but it deals with gaining accrediatation as being competent rather than assurance of per se.

Competence isn't a defacto state and needs to be reassessed regularly. People's ability to be able to make educated decisions decreases over time when not exposed to a specific skill. Re-training and re-validation is often necessary especially when the skill changes over time, e.g. standards, good-practice, equipment alterations.

From the management point of view, people need to assess individuals and be sufficiently skilled to be able to identify the requirements of the skill are met but also spot issues, i.e. negative behavioural traits.

I think what the question asks for is that people's competence is checked, they are re-trained where required and not asked to work outside of their skillset. Of course, you would expect there to be corporate support to a "refusal to work" policy.

Like you, I would avoid this as it is very easy to deivate away from an M1 answer.

[PJW]

This is not an attempt to answer this specific question, but is some notes relating to a Competence management System and thus should provide some useful input for this topic.

I was surprised this hasn't been attempted on here before and would be interested to see any ideas/answers people have.

Thanks

Rich