Define for me what is well trained? And how do you verify it?

Andreas Frejborg, Technical Sales Manager / 29 Mar 2019

Yeah, good set of questions indeed. These have been popping with a higher and higher frequency during the past 6 months, as I have been concentrating on meeting and discussing with the key players in the Oil and Gas sector regarding training and education of their panel and field operators.

The whole industry is in the middle of a generation shift, where a lot of silent competence and knowledge is about to retire. These persons are highly skilled and are very well equipped with hands-on knowledge to cope with merely any kind of upset situation. Now, the challenge is to transfer this invaluable knowledge to the new operators moving in.  Back in the days that was easy, because the newbies had to a operate a plant by manual operations and learned by doing it. But today we have an ever higher degree of automation that do everything for you. On top of that the business pushes the production to maximum limits. There is really no room for any mistakes – or should I say almost good plant operating – anymore. Talk about the contradiction here!

I think the key to solve this issue is to set up a well-defined Digitalized Learning Path. This in my eyes is not only about having a clear process of what to learn, but more important – nowadays – offer several ways of doing the learning.  For us that has been 20 years or so in the business we like to have it the old fashion way with tidy classroom training looking at powerpoints. But the new generation that now is joining us at work they have a different way of thinking. They are very digital-minded and highly competitive. Hence, the training must be made available at both location and time of persons choice. Additionally, the training must be highly appealing and addictive in the sense that one actually would do the course for more than max 5 minutes.  Repetition is the key as with any learning and there are different ways to learn, which complement each other but according to many studies interactive games are highly effective way to learn.

Luckily for you I have the answer to this, because here at NAPCON we have a really cool set of tools that really makes the training fun, challenging and – yes- addictive. To start of we have the NAPCON Games portfolio, which are a fundamental part of the Digitalized Learning Path all from understanding of basic principles all to more complex understanding of process unit behavior.  With statistics from this training tool, you can verify learning and optimize your shifts the best possible way. And as the topping of the cake we offer the high-fidelity emulated operator training simulator systems that cover in-depth learning of production unit behaviors.

Another topic that has come apparent is that also the Training Departments need also to step up for the challenge, how things are done now is no longer sufficient to fulfill the needs of the trainees of today.  I can already say that we have something in the back pocket for that also, but I will come back to that in a later blog post.