Podcast: Master 5 Critical Guidelines for Effective Operator Training

In this Chemical Processing podcast, Traci Purdum and Dave Strobhar discuss training guidelines for operators. They cover five of 11 guidelines based on Walter Schneider's research: promoting consistent processing to build automaticity (where tasks become automatic), designing training for repeated practice of critical skills, avoiding memory overload through reference materials, varying training conditions to match real-world scenarios, and maintaining active trainee participation. Dave emphasizes practical applications like alarm recognition and emergency response training. The discussion highlights how proper training helps operators perform effectively under stress by developing automatic responses to critical situations rather than relying solely on conscious thought.

Transcript

Traci: Welcome to the Operator Training edition of Chemical Processing's Distilled Podcast. This podcast and 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 CP, and joining me once again 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 newly minted columnist for Chemical Processing, writing about all things operator training. Happy New Year, Dave.

Dave: Thanks, Traci. Happy New Year to you. And I hope all the listeners are going to be looking at 2026 as an opportunity to improve their training programs.

Traci: Absolutely. And we're going to try and help with that, aren't we?

Dave: Absolutely, yes.

Traci: Well, the last time you and I chatted, we discussed six fallacies associated with training high-performance skills. In this episode, we're going to discuss guidelines to correct for those fallacies. And to make this manageable and to practice what we're preaching, we're going to break this up into two parts. Today we will address five of the six guidelines, and then in the next podcast we will tackle the final six. This is based on the paper "Training High Performance Skills: Fallacies and Guidelines" written by Walter Schneider at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. And I think the best way for us to tackle this is just for me to read out each guideline and then let you have at it with all of your expertise on that. Sound good?

Dave: Sounds like a good plan.

Traci: All right. Well, the first one is: Present information to promote consistent processing by the operator.

Dave: Yeah, this is one of the guidelines that I think a lot of people could read and go, "Well, I'm not exactly sure what that means." But what you're trying to do with training is you're hoping to make the task something the individual doesn't really even have to think about. They just do it. There's a characteristic in human information processing, and it's called automaticity. And as the name would imply, it's making something so it's automatic. And if you train a particular task over and over again, eventually you get to the point where your brain will reserve a small portion just for that task, and so it doesn't have to go in with all the other things for active processing and using up short-term memory. And so what you want to do is you want to keep this task and you want to practice it over and over again. And the desire is to then have them turn that into this sort of automatic so that when this happens, boom, I am ready to go.

And so if you're presenting alarms on your alarm summary screen by time of actuation instead of grouping it by priority, recognition of the emergency priority — so if you're training them and you continue to practice, "Can I pick out the emergency priorities from all the others?" — because what you want to be able to do is build that little area of the brain for recognizing these critical alarms and be able to do that even if they're overwhelmed. And that's the whole goal in this automaticity, is that they can be totally stressed out, but when that emergency alarm comes in, if you've built this little capacity in the brain, it will process it and do it automatically. And so that's what this particular solution or guideline is trying to do, is you want to try to promote that movement from having to think about the task to you just do it and you don't even have to think about it.

Traci: I visualize when I'm driving home sometimes and then I get home and I'm like, "Geez, I don't remember driving home" because I'm thinking about other things, you know? But my brain is just making the turns it needs to make. So I'm assuming this is kind of the concept there.

Dave: Same thing, yeah. So that's where you have your drive home. You've built this little portion of your brain to do that and you don't have to think about it. You just do it. And like you said, you get home and you're like, "Wow, I sure hope I stopped at stoplights and all that type of thing." But you don't remember passing the CVS or whatever it is. And it's because you were on basically automatic pilot at that point.

Traci: Oh, that's cool. The next guideline here is: Design the task to allow many trials of critical skills.

Dave: Yes. So one of the problems in training, and particularly you see this with people with these full plant simulators, is you can have an operator sit in front of it for long periods of time. But what you really want to do is you want to identify, "Well, what are the critical subtasks that I'm going to ask the operator to do?" And I'd like them to do that as much as possible and don't waste your time on the sort of noncritical aspects. In a particular unit, a cat cracker, one of the issues is oftentimes you can initiate a reactor bypass. And it can either be done automatically or the operator can initiate it themselves. And if it's done automatically, the operator can intervene and prevent it from happening. So you've got a situation where very quickly the operator has to decide, "Should I divert or not divert?" And then concurrently, "Should I allow it to do it automatically or should I intervene?" That's a very critical task. It has safety and economic implications. So if you have a simulator, you want to focus on that task and you want to have them practice that as much as possible, not the whole "I'm going to control the FCC unit" because you're going to be in periods of time when there's not a lot going on. So you want to compress that down. So those critical skills that you've identified, you can do more trials of those. So in that hour time, if you did operating the unit for the whole hour and maybe once in that hour you ran across that diversion scenario, you spent a lot of time wasted on things that don't matter as much. You'd be better to repeat that critical scenario four or five times in that hour and give them more trials on that particular skill.

Traci: The third guideline we have here is: Do not overload temporary memory and minimize the memory decay.

Dave: Yeah. So as you're going through the training, your temporary memory, your working memory — we've talked about that in some of our previous podcasts — it's a capacity-limited system. So you're going to have cases where I need to bring information in from long-term memory and that's going to tend to overload the temporary memory for performing the task. So what you want to try to do is help the operator by having reference information available. So that's really what a procedure is about. It's having that information in some form so I don't have to keep it in my long-term memory and move it to temporary memory, and it will refresh itself using either a procedure or checklist or certain guides. But because of the limitations in the temporary memory, as you're going through these training tasks, you can very quickly fill that up. So provide them the memory aids — probably not a whole procedure, but if I need to know certain temperatures, you know, what are the cut points on a crude distillation column, don't require that to be held in their short-term memory. Provide a sheet that says, "OK, these are some of the critical values." Because what you really want, you don't want to waste your time with them trying to access this information. You want them to practice on the task. So get the information and have it ready for them.

Traci: And I was thinking, you know, having those sheets or those little memory joggers there, but they do go through the entire thing at one point. So they know all of the procedures they need to go through, and then once they're comfortable with that, then they can just rely on these little memory joggers.

Dave: Yes, yeah. So if you really want them to have that as part of, "No, you need to know that," then that gets back up to our first one. OK, well then you need to practice that so it gets into that automatic processing issue where I can just tell you right off the bat, "Here's the critical RPMs on this compressor. It's at this point," and it's something that is quickly utilized in the task. So they need to perform the whole procedure, and you do do that, but then you don't keep doing it over and over again. You make sure the little subtasks are the ones that you're going to repeat and do. And then the others that are not quite as important — eventually it's like, "How do I put it all together?" And so if I'm focusing on the subtask, then maybe I provide these sort of decision aids that are occurring.

Traci: Number four is: Vary aspects of the task that vary in the operational setting.

Dave: Yes. So sometimes people try to — and again, we'll go with simulators — there's this notion of, "OK, well, I want to practice a trip of this major compressor on the simulator." And so you have the simulator at full rates and the compressor trips and they respond to it. Well, you're not always going to be at full rates. There's all sorts of things that are going to vary in the real world. Maybe you're at three-quarters or half rates. You want to have them also practice in those scenarios as well. So you may develop a scenario, but if it's going to vary in the real world, well, you want it to vary in the training. So don't create this idealized world where, "Hey, I've practiced that compressor trip going at full rates," but "Wow, we're at turndown rates now and does it behave the same way? Should I expect to see the same things?" And so if it's going to change in the real world, you need to make sure that when you're training them on it, you're changing it also in the training. Otherwise you're going to be writing an incident report that said, "Well, the operator did what was appropriate if we were at full rates, but because we were at turndown rates, the task they took resulted in some sort of incident" that's getting written up. So be cautious as you're training. Don't do it just for the idealized situation. In fact, there is a study by the Center of Operator Performance that said one of the ways you may want to look at this is typically when you're training people and going through these scenarios, if I have spare pumps, the spare pumps always are available. Well, take them through it and say, "Well, what if that pump was out for maintenance? I don't have a spare pump, I only have one pump, and that pump goes down. What do you do?" And so at some point I was at a plant where their high-pressure boiler feedwater turbine was out for maintenance and they had a power failure, so boom. That power failure now becomes a power failure and a loss of steam because they don't have a pump to supply the boilers. So you need to vary as you're going through the training so they practice not just the, "Well, this is the ideal state," but the less-than-ideal state.

Traci: That's important for all of us through life, I think. Pivot. Our final guideline that we're going to talk about today is: Maintain active participation throughout training.

Dave: Yeah. So basically you don't want the trainee to be passive. In other words, you don't want to just be telling them things or having them look at things. You want them to generate very frequent responses, every minute or so. So even if you're having them monitor a process — again, we'll use the simulator example — so I'm sitting and putting them in front of the simulator and they're going to go a period where you haven't even initiated the event or whatever. But keep them engaged by asking questions. "Well, is your overhead temperature in the right range?" You haven't done anything to the unit. Of course it's in the right range, but you can make them look and respond, "Yes, it's at 250 degrees," whatever the number is. So you want to keep them and their alertness basically always active. You don't want them to fall into this sort of passive mode where, "Well, I'm just waiting for something to happen." You want to keep them engaged and you do that by requiring a response from them frequently, so that even if the response isn't your primary objective, you want to do that so that they stay engaged in the training. So when you get to that training portion, they are at the best point for receiving those new skills that you want them to take on.

Traci: Well, Dave, I want to thank you for the first five guidelines, and we're going to get to those other six. You always help us bolster our operator training and help us be prepared for those less-than-ideal situations. Hopefully we can start out on a strong foot for the new year. So I appreciate the time you've put into this. Join us next time, as I mentioned, we will discuss those final six guidelines. 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. Thanks again, Dave.

Dave: Thanks, Traci.