Course Description

The competence of personnel is crucial to process safety as it helps to ensure that tasks are carried out satisfactorily to achieve adequate levels of safety and tolerable levels of risk. Competence implies appropriate qualifications, experience, training, skills, physical and mental capabilities, knowledge, understanding, fitness for duty, behavior and attitudes as well as the ability to perform tasks according to defined performance standards. Often assumptions of competence are made based on the adequacy of experience or training, possession of qualifications, or the availability of a procedure. Not only may such assumptions be incorrect, but they do not capture all the key aspects of competence.

Competence should be managed; otherwise poor performance and accidents may result. Indeed accidents have occurred when competencies other than knowledge and experience were absent. Competence management is particularly important when an organization relies heavily on the skills, knowledge and capabilities of its personnel, such as in the process industries. The importance of competence is compounded in the face of the re-engineering, downsizing, and multi-tasking that can occur in the process industries. Personnel are often expected to take on a wider range of tasks with less supervision thus increasing the need to manage competence effectively. Competence management should be planned, proactive and systematic.

This course explains how a competence management program for process safety can be developed and implemented. Course attendees participate in workshops to reinforce the material presented.

You will learn:

• Meaning and importance of process safety competence
• Benefits of a competence management system (CMS)
• Purpose, goals and applicability of a CMS for process safety
• Elements and requirements of a CMS
• How to design and implement a CMS
• Issues to address in developing a CMS
• Differences between individual, group and organizational competence
• Levels and stages of competence and competence profiles
• Issues that affect competence
• Relationship between competence, procedures and training
• How to establish performance standards and selection criteria for process safety roles
• How to use competency matrices
• How to assess competence
• Ways to monitor competence
• Methods for maintaining competence
• Which roles should require certification of competence

Objective

Understand how to ensure the competence of personnel whose job performance, individually, as members of teams, and as part of an organization, can impact the safety of process facilities.

Target Audience

Personnel with responsibilities for process safety.

Prerequisite

None.

Course Contents

• Overview
• Competence management system
• Establish competence requirements
• Competence Matrices
• Design CMS
• Implement CMS
• Maintain competence
• Audit and review CMS

Duration

• One day
• 0.7 CEUs or 7 PDHs awarded

Tuition

• For USA Courses, see Schedule

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