An approach to grid control engineer training using national occupational standards

Scottish Power plc. (SP) holds a combined generation, transmission and supply licence for the southern part of Scotland. A team of grid control and despatch engineers provides round the clock control and operation of the 400 kV, 275 kV and 132 kV electricity transmission grid from the Grid Control Centre (GCC) at Kirkintilloch, Glasgow. All generation connected to the SP Grid, whether or not it is owned by SP, is despatched from the SP GCC. KeFax Ltd. is a training provider specialising in technical training for the Electricity Supply Industry (ESI) and has been associated with SP technical training for Grid System Operation staff for the past four years. Grid control engineer competence has been, and continues to be, assessed against company standards, which are based on UK best practice. SP employs KeFax to provide assessors, internal verifiers and trainers, to develop training programmes and to manage the assessment of Grid System Operations engineering staff. They use a computer based competency and training management system, ESI Competency Manager, to facilitate this work. This paper describes the experiences of SP and KeFax in attempting to assess competence against national occupational standards