In this episode, Traci and Dave discuss the importance of practice in operator training programs. Practice is often overlooked despite being crucial. Realistic scenarios that mimic real-world conditions, including time constraints and environmental challenges, are beneficial to anchoring lessons learned. Feedback loops are also necessary to evaluate individual performance and improve training programs. The new concept of micro training, in addition to having operators teach others, helps operators continuously practice their skills.
Transcript
Welcome to the Operator training edition of Chemical Processing's Distilled Podcast. This podcast in its transcript can be found at chemicalprocessing.com. You can also download this podcast on your favorite player. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing, and joining me is Dave Strobhar, founder and principal human-factors engineer for Beville Engineering. Dave is also the founder of the Center for Operator Performance and a repeat offender here on the Distilled Podcast. Hey Dave, what have you been working on?
Dave: Well, I've been working on a lot of issues around trying to reduce operator error in the industry, and obviously, training is a big part of that, and so hopefully, we can share some thoughts or ideas that people can grab onto
Traci: You and I have been working on a series of podcasts that examine the flaws in industry training. We've discussed instructional system design, job analysis and learning objectives, and now we're going to talk about practice. So, let's start off by asking how you design a practice program for operators.
Designing Practice Programs for Operators
Dave: Well, part of it is to do that, to actually say we're going to have practice as part of our training. So, after you've done the job analysis, you've done the learning objectives, and now you're going to create the instructional program. And most instructional programs, you're good on two parts. One is explaining, and the other is demonstrating the task. But where so many training programs hold down is they don't allow practice, and that's like trying to learn how to swim from the internet. You've got to get in the water. And so, one of the things that to put practice into the operator training program is to make that an intentional objective. Okay, how are we going to help them practice this particular task or this particular skill? S that they can see how they perform, evaluate it themselves, and have the instructor evaluate it and provide some sort of feedback to the operators rather than just saying, okay, well, here's what it's about. Here's how you do it, showing a video of somebody swimming, but you need to get 'em in the water. And you do that by making it an intentional or conscious aspect of your training program.
Traci: Now, getting into the water is an easy thing, right? It's just straightforward. But what about making sure the scenarios that you're teaching to operators are realistic? You can't just throw them into something, or can you
Realistic Training
Dave: Well, at first, but so as you go through, you're going to want, as you see their performance improve to a certain extent, then you're going to want to say, okay, this is some idealized situation. Now, let's do it in a real-world sort of situation, which doesn't necessarily mean a simulator going out in the unit, but it means adding things to it that you are likely to experience. So poor environmental issues, it's dark, you can't see very well those things are going to happen. So now do it in that sort of situation, put some stress with it because that's often a key issue. Hey, you got to do this fast. And so you can't just take your time, but you want to ramp up that stress by simply putting a time limit on it. You have two minutes to do this particular task and have the stopwatch or whatever to time them to say, is this happening?
So, you need to bring some of that. What happens in real life in the scenario? I was investigating a power failure at a unit or a collection of units, and I was talking to a relatively new operator, and he mentioned that they had just practiced the power failure procedure or drill the day before. And I asked him, he said, oh, did that help? And he said, well, it helped a little bit, but I wasn't scared during the drill. And so, you need to start adding some of those real-world aspects to the practice sessions. Don't make it all nice and perfect; bring in that, hey, things aren't going to go the way you think they are, or you may not get all the information, or it's going to, you're going to have to do this at 4:00 AM in the pouring rain. I'm not saying hit 'em with a hose or anything but make the environment not perfect for them to do it.
Traci: What about impromptu scenarios where it is raining, and it's 4 a.m., and somebody says this would be a good time to test them? Is there an ethical thing behind that?
Dave: No, no. I think that's absolutely appropriate, and that's where having your team leaders looking for training opportunities; this is an opportunity to train on doing something in less-than-ideal circumstances. The crew may not like it, but it may improve their performance and it may save somebody from getting hurt someday. So you want to invest in the team leaders, whether that's the head operator or the shift supervisor, whatever, whoever's leading this group needs to look for those opportunities to practice and say, okay, we're going to do this in this situation that is not critical. And they know it's not critical, but you will get used to making it happen. There's a story of a doctor who had a patient that was not going to survive, and he told the nursing staff, keep him alive because we have this new piece of equipment, and I've never used it, and I need to try to use it. It probably won't save him, but because I've practiced now on a living patient, I may be able to save the next patient that comes in. So, you want to take advantage of where you can practice doing the different tasks or scenarios in the noncritical situation so that when it truly is the critical situation, then you're ready to perform at your peak.
Traci: You mentioned simulators, that you don't want to do it on a simulator; you want to have sort of a real-world scenario. But do simulators have a room in practice? Do they have something that will make them effective? How do you make simulations effective?
Are Simulators Effective for Practice?
Dave: Yeah, simulators have a role to play, particularly for console operators working on the distributed control system, and they can adjust or tune the controllers and make responses. But similar to what I was talking about before, you do want to put those time limits in it once they get useful for it, and you want to try to put a time scenario or time limit on the scenario so that they have to go fast. You also want to try to make sure that you aren't just telling them what to do because a key part is going to be their decision-making. You want to give them perhaps some general guidelines as to what we think is happening, but not the details. Well, go to this controller and make this adjustment. You can say we are over-pressuring all the columns, and they're all going to flare.
Take the action. You don't even have to program the industry. It's just, okay, what would you do now to address this situation? And have them go through the actions to grab the correct controllers and make the adjustments so that they have to think it through; okay, what would I do in this situation? And then carry it out on the simulator. So simulators are good for things we would call muscle memory. They're motor actions; in other words, how much output equals how much increase in this PV, and that's all very worthwhile and necessary. But then there's also the decision-making and information processing that goes on before they grab that particular controller. And that's a key part that you want to practice. Do you know what controller to take, not just how you would manipulate it? Do you know what your overall actions are going to be? And so you want to provide some ambiguity and force them to make certain decisions so you can see what is their thought process, what's their mental model, and why they are taking that particular action. There are drill centers for operator performance. We have decision-making exercises that are designed to do just that: give 'em symptoms and say, okay, with these symptoms, what do you think is going on? And that way we can understand how they're processing the information that you're giving them.
Traci: How do you ensure that practice sessions are focused on areas where the operators need the most improvement, and how do you, each operator's going to be different?
Focus Practice Sessions
Dave: Well, and that's one of the key parts of instructional system design is having a feedback loop. Too often, students are sent out to do things, and there is no feedback on whether they did it correctly. If you practice it wrong, you're going to perform it wrong. So, you have to have something that comes back and says, ah, you didn't do this. Well, you need this both in terms of the specific because as you said, every individual is different, and so you want to be able to have a grading system, which will come from your learning objectives. Are you getting close to doing this on your learning objectives? But you also want to have it for your training system as a whole. Nobody seems to be getting this aspect of doing this task. They still seem to be lost. We need to reevaluate how we're doing the demonstration and the introduction to the material to do that.
So, you want two different feedback loops. You want the individual students to be graded and have a basis for doing so. That's where when you start putting those time limits in, it's like, hey, you're taking too long. Let's try to find out where you are stumbling in making this shorter. Other people can do it as well as you're looking over your entire training program; you should have feedback from this particular set of learning objectives that says, nobody's doing very well on this, so we need to do or emphasize this more. And so, feedback was a key part of the whole ISD approach that the Air Force was looking at is it shouldn't be an open loop system. You shouldn't just say, here, this is what you need to do. I demonstrated it for you. Now go do it. You want to be able to say, are you doing it to the criteria that I want you to do it to?
Traci: How can operators continue to practice all of these skills while still working their day jobs, their night jobs, or whatever shift they're on?
Keep On Practicing
Dave: Well, it is interesting; Dr. Gary Klein came up with the 13 characteristics of experts looking across various domains and what makes an expert. One of the characteristics that an expert has that novices do not is mental simulations in that experts will do some mental simulations when they're just on their job, basically asking themselves what-if questions. What would happen if this occurred, or what would happen if that occurred and going through to come up with some sort of solution or an answer? So, encouraging that sort of a mental simulation is obviously a key part in moving from the novice to the expert. Something that is sort of on the horizon is called microtraining. And micro training is where you would send out the cell phone or the company website or whatever, little training exercises and lessons. And so you would train the operators in these little short bursts so that they would have an opportunity to do some practice and the micro training would prompt or make that practice happen.
Every plant now has these canned videos that the operators take through on a PowerPoint or something on their computers, but those are very generic how to do lockout tag out. And pretty much the operators do, they have to do 'em, and because there's no real feedback, we don't really know what is occurring. But this micro training is not supposed to take very long. They're supposed to be just quick, Hey, what about this? What would you do? Or how would you handle this? So micro training, which is just in its infancy in the process industries, has some real potential for keeping the operators fresh by having them think through and essentially do those mental simulations, some of those things that they learned two, three, four years ago and really haven't practiced since then. So, experts eventually do it on their own and that's why they're experts. But we can try to move just the novice operators to that expert characteristic by giving them these little props and nothing major just, Hey, what about, or what would you do? Or how would you handle these particular situations?
Traci: You and I have discussed the 13 characteristics of experts, and I'll be sure to link that in the transcript of this podcast. You're also talking about microlearning. Are there other ways operators can keep improving their skills after the initial training?
Dave: Probably one; this would sort of have to be done with the management’s approval to take on new operators to teach them. It's been set. I never learned a topic so well as when I had to teach it. So yeah, you can create systems whereby even identify; hey, you're going to be our lube oil guru, and we want you to create training topics for everybody because people forget. And we had a case in our decision decision-making exercises where the expert was, they were responding to an event, and the experts said, oh, I put steam up the riser and the other operator, it's five or six years experience. It's not new. He said, oh, wow, that's a great idea to do that. He said, well, I thought we all did that. So, there's a real opportunity, even though you think, oh, well, we all know that.
Well, maybe you do, but the only way to find out is to have somebody take you through it and say, here, do this. And maybe somebody prompts the instructor, oh, hey, I found one time, and I did it this way, and it worked better, or I did it this way. It was horrible. But continuing that sort of doing the actual tasks and getting feedback as a regular part of what the crews are doing, and probably, obviously weekends are usually when these sort of things when maintenance isn't around that you can build these in. The key thing from a management standpoint is to have that expectation and put that out that this is what we expect you to do. Let's make sure that these happen over the course of a period of time.
Traci: Now you're talking about management and getting management approval and having the buy-in there. What about the time and resource constraints? How can these might limit the opportunity to provide regular practice opportunities for operators? How do you manage that?
Manage Resources to Ensure Practice Happens
Dave: Well, and that's usually one of the cases, oh, I don't have enough people. There used to be a belief that probably still exists in places that all training occurs off shift and that I have to come in on overtime to get training. And, of course, that puts some real resource constraints on. And I think what we're trying to put forth here is no, you don't have to take people off shift. There are ways to do it on shift. We're not going to. We can set up a system that you can utilize as part of your normal shift practices in terms of having either the microlearning or a training opportunity presenting itself, or we're going to have somebody take us through this particular system and demonstrate, or we can practice with it. All of that's on shift. So if done correctly, it should actually alleviate some of the training resource issues by saying, Hey, we don't have to pull people off shift and cover their jobs with overtime to make this happen. We just need to set the proper expectations of how we will do this.
Traci: Well, Dave, I always appreciate your stories and how you present things and break them down for us and give complex things, simplistic views, and helping us basically to get into the water and practice. So, thank you for the time you've put into that. Folks, join us next time as we discuss another flaw in training the time to train, which we're kind of talking about now, but we're going to get into it a little bit more in the next episode. Want to stay on top of operator training and performance? Subscribe to this free podcast via your favorite podcast platform to learn best practices and keen insights. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you achieve success. On behalf of Dave, I'm Traci. And this is Chemical Processing’s Distilled podcast operator training edition. Thanks for listening, and thanks again, Dave!
