One of the critical characteristics of the modern workplace is its – praiseworthy – obsession with competence. This focus on competence is the growth of regulations, including legislation, aimed at ensuring that workers and their employers prove their ability to comply with legal, safe and appropriate ways of working, which safeguard everyone involved, including customers.
Organizations operating in any tightly regulated industry need processes and systems that ensure their workers’ competence – and prove it for the independent regulators. Such methods and procedures should not only reduce the organization’s compliance costs and risk but should also improve levels of customer service; monitor each worker’s compliance; create a competency framework for each job role; streamline the compliance process, and provide access to up-to-date, real-time information relating to such things as competence and skills gaps. More than merely satisfying the demands of regulatory and compliance bodies, this should continually improve the organization’s productivity.
The challenge for those responsible for ensuring organizational compliance – those working in or with the organization’s human resources (HR) department – is developing the processes and finding the systems that will do these things effectively and efficiently. Other modern workplace issues are added to this challenge’s complexity, including remote and hybrid working.
All these issues are increasingly leading to the use of technology to solve the challenge – notably the advent of platforms that monitor and produce reports relating to compliance across an organization by job role.
One heavily regulated sector – the oil and gas drilling industry, which comprises some 3.8% of the global economy, with revenues of some $3.3tr in 2019 – prefers to use only those operations practitioners who, when responsible for delivering work used in safety-critical aspects of planning and executing wells, can demonstrate their competency. The legal – and environmental – consequences of failing to prove this are serious, yet demonstrating competency can be challenging for these practitioners.
According to Christine Telford, a member of Operations Geoscience International Competency Assessment (OGICA), “Professional organizations appraise practitioners’ abilities based on education, references, continuing professional development (CPD) and work experience, together with organizational membership. While these are important components of a Competency Management System (CMS), they don’t validate the proficiency for the practitioner to work to a recognized standard.”
Believing that what’s needed is an impartial technical skills assessment, OGICA has developed an objective skills self-assessment tool for those working operationally in upstream oil & gas geoscience. Utilizing an online software platform from online training and assessment specialist eCom (Scotland), the tool allows operations geoscientists to objectively assess and benchmark their current skill levels. Highlighting skill gaps, which individuals can address via different experience and/or training as part of their career CPD, the output visualizes their results. A digital micro-credential is also issued, which can be uploaded to share results online. Oil and service company employees, independent consultants, and one major oil & gas company in the Middle East are now using the assessment framework in-house. Several major international operators are exploring how the framework can support their activities.
“It’s not just the oil & gas sector that’s benefitting from applying technology to solve competency, skills gaps, and related issues,” comments Linda Steedman, eCom Scotland’s CEO. “For example, eCom’s net enterprise platform for managing learning, development, and competency across all levels in an organization is being used by companies in the construction, manufacturing, and livestock sectors and organizations in the public sector. They all need to monitor competency levels; identify and remove skills gaps as and when they occur, and continually improve worker efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.”
Necessary Systems in an Organization
In addition to identifying and monitoring competency levels, organizations need a coherent system that provides:
- A complete picture of Skills development throughout the organization – ideally, at a glance via rapidly-generated reports. This allows users to build competent teams; empower continuous learning; track and measure performance data, and provide the workforce with the tools to do their best work.
- Relevant help for workers at the Onboarding stage to help them become competent and productive as soon as possible.
- Useful Analysis of real-time worker performance data – which can alert learning and development professionals as well as senior managers to the emergence of skills gaps as well as potential or actual competency shortfalls.
- Constant support to help workers Perform to the best of their ability. This includes gathering feedback through 360-degree reviews, evaluations, surveys, and assessments to help teams reach their goals.
- Opportunities for Social learning – allowing learners to share ideas, collaborate in developing knowledge and skills and enhance communications.
“Providing these things – known by the acronym ‘SOAPS’ – would allow an organization using this system to be ‘squeaky clean’ when proving competence for regulatory bodies,” smiled Linda Steedman.
