Developing and Maintaining Competence - Experiences from the Rail Industry

Competence plays a very important role in controlling risks - especially in degraded and emergency situations where it is often the actions of people which are critical in returning the system to a ´normal´ state. This paper draws on experiences in the UK rail industry where organisations have been required to have formal ´competence management systems´ for safety critical work for many years. Rail industry organizations are required to develop, maintain and assess the competence of individuals on an ongoing basis - training and once-off assessment is no longer an acceptable means of inferring competence. We explore some of the issues that the rail industry has faced when developing systems for managing competence, with particular reference to degraded and emergency situations, and which may be equally relevant to other hazardous industries.