East West Rail Alliance: Non-Technical Skills On ‘Site’ Training

GatewayHSW have collaborated with East West Rail Alliance to develop and deliver bespoke Non-Technical Skills training to the East West Rail Alliance workforce delivered on site at their work area.

What are Non-Technical Skills?

Technical skills and underpinning knowledge describe what you need to do and know for a given safety critical task.  Non-technical skills (NTS) compliment technical skills and underpinning knowledge and help individuals understand their personal approach to tasks, the risk and errors that can occur, and how this approach can be enhanced to mitigate against risk and errors.  Analysis of accidents in a range of safety critical industries suggests that NTS are important in helping front line safety critical staff identity, manage, mitigate and recover from threats and errors.

Training Solution

The training  programme involved delivery of short duration (max. 1-hour) sessions out on the site at a suitable and safe location.  Delivery of such training on site was beneficial to provide the opportunity for transference of learning directly to the workplace, dealing with the real world challenges and issues frontline teams have to address on a daily basis.  These sessions were designed for work teams including operatives, supervisors and engineers.

The sessions are facilitative in style and based on each workface scenario.  The content of the training sessions were structured yet flexible to cater for different group needs and priorities across the breadth of workforce, experience, and disciplines.

The NTS skills covered in each session were selected from the following, as appropriate to each work group:

• Situational awareness
• Decision making
• Workload and demands
• Working in a team

GatewayHSW have delivered NTS training sessions to the East West Rail Alliance from Spring 2022 and will continue throughout 2023.

Feedback

It had been beneficial to all involved to be able to apply the NTS concepts to the real work environment where the training was delivered.  Delivering to small groups at a time optimised engagement.  The duration of each session, aimed at 1 hour was sufficient to achieve the key learning points as well as maintain engagement and attention for delivery at a live site environment.  The use of a blend of media and format throughout the sessions worked well.

The close working relationship between GatewayHSW and the EWR contact was essential to successfully deliver the number of training sessions required. 100% of learners felt that the course will help them in their day to day work.

“Very well presented.  Very knowledgeable information to remember and pass on”

“Excellent – Thank you for the update on how to work safely”

“Helped bring everyone together to work as a team”

“Continue doing that, it’s good for me and my team. Thanks”

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