Philippa Murphy
RSSB
Philippa has worked in various roles within the rail industry over the past 20 years. She has worked on train radio design projects, in human factors at Network Rail, in the Infrastructure Projects arm of Network Rail and in RSSB's human factors team.
Priya has worked in the rail industry for over 9 years, previously working with CIRAS as a researcher. She holds a Masters in Organisational Psychology and is working towards Chartered Psychologist status. Prior to joining RSSB, Priya worked as a lecturer on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in psychology, business and human resource management at London Metropolitan University. Priya has worked for a local London council and has experience of developing competency frameworks and training programmes in the voluntary sector. Her areas of rail expertise include competence management, non-technical skills, selection & assessment, risk-based training needs analysis, and fatigue. She is currently leading the validation of psychometric tests for train driver selection and supports RSSB in delivering NTS training.
Operational tasks in a railway environment need to be completed correctly, consistently and sometimes repeated frequently, to a high standard. This requires the person to know what they need to do, and be competent to carry this out. Competence is made up of the knowledge of the what the task is about, i.e. processes, procedures and restrictions around technical tasks, functional skills (the ability to read, write and use appropriate ICT, and non-technical skills (NTS) which describe the way in which the technical task is carried out.
With the introduction of The Railways and Other Guided Transport (Safety) regulations (ROGS) in 2006, all duty holders have the responsibility of ensuring, so far as is reasonably practicable, that the competence of all safety-critical staff under their control is developed and maintained to a minimum safe standard. This is a key part of maintaining a safety licence to operate. All the activities under this umbrella form part of a company’s competence management system (CMS). Companies can manage learning and assessment activities in a way which aligns to their individual risk profiles and reflects leading practice in competence development (RSSB, 2013: RS/100).
The recent release of the ORR’s guidance on competence management highlights the regulatory expectations for NTS to be considered, throughout the competence management system (CMS). This paper describes how this can be fulfilled and the benefits for an organisation of doing this, by using RSSB’s revised NTS guidance[1], tools and supporting materials. A robust CMS covers all aspects of an individual’s role in an organisation.
Since the inception of the RSSB NTS skills list[2] and associated guidance[3] in 2012, RSSB has supported members to better understand what NTS are, their benefits and how to integrate them. As the industry has become more mature and made progress on this, so the guidance needed to be amended. As such, RSSB sought feedback on what the industry now needs and collaboratively created guidance on how NTS can be integrated.
This paper provides detail on how this can be done and what is required at the six different steps of competence management, from having a robust plan for NTS integration, through their integration into the selection process, identification of the relevant NTS, how these can be trained and measured, and finally how the whole process can continually be improved. This paper also describes the Risk Based Training Needs Analysis (RBTNA) which can be used at the ‘Identifying’ step to fulfil the ORR’s expectation of the assessment of risks in the CMS and how NTS can be embedded within the CMS. The paper describes how the RBTNA has been used with rail companies, and on research projects[4] to inform NTS material development, for non-driver roles.
The paper concludes with some examples of how the NTS Integration Guide has been successfully used by rail companies, where the rail industry is currently with NTS integration and the next steps which RSSB are planning to continue to support the industry.
[1] https://www.rssb.co.uk/library...
[2] https://www.rssb.co.uk/pages/r...
[3] https://www.rssb.co.uk/library...
[4] https://www.rssb.co.uk/library...
