Using Learning Data to Manage Your Workforce

Industry – Energy Services & Contract Workforce

Overview:

This organization manages 4,200 plus contractors providing a variety of services for major drilling operators from embedded maintenance staff to engineers and geophysical scientist. In addition to working in a demanding industry with a high-level of regulatory oversight, each operator that the company supports defines a corporate slate of training, license and certification requirements working in their facilities. Managing this workforce so that the organization can nimbly react to contract changes in a highly competitive market highlights the function of the Learning and Development team as the accuracy of their training programs and associated reports directly impact the company’s capability.

Challenge and Solutions:

This group faces three distinct challenges that impact the focus and function of their Learning team:

• Compliance Management
• Highly Fluid Workforce
• Workforce Logistics
• Compliance management is a challenge because of the environmental, health and safety training regulation impacting the industry. This challenge is compounded by Operator-specific requirements such as being qualified on each Operator’s company-specific policies, procedures and programs such as energy isolation and emergency response. Many compliance courses have a refresher frequency or renewal requirements that must be monitored such as Commercial Driving License requirements and First Aid Certification.
• In addition to the legal- and operator-based requirements, Occupational Health Assessments, such as annual audiograms and respirator fit tests, are required for many of the jobs the organization performs. While the health assessments are not ‘training’ they are still a requirement that must be completed to be qualified to work and have defined refresher frequencies.
• The Learning and Development group leverage a number of VTA tools to ensure compliance management. First training requirement plans have been developed for both roles and operators making it easy to see who is in compliance with both their job qualifications and the requirement of different operators to work on-site. Employee status reports can be run to document compliance and to identify upcoming training demand ba sed on the expiration of courses with refresher frequencies. VTA becomes a one-stop shop for compliance reporting as driving license and occupational health assessments are also stored in the system reducing cost by eliminating duplicate systems and consolidating reporting.
• VTA also supports compliance though the electronic signoff of policies and e-mail integration so that students always know when new training assignments are made. Supervisor self-service in VTA makes it easy for supervisors to monitor their employees’ training progress and plan work accordingly.
  
• An added challenge for the training group in this environment is the highly fluid work force. Because the vast number of employees are working as contractors and outsourced talent, the organization must be able to quickly assemble work crews with the skills, knowledge and qualifications to move between operation groups. Managing training and qualification within the RISC VTA LMS, the organization is capable of making a quick and accurate assessment of talent to satisfy the staffing needs of the various operators .
  
• In addition to using VTA for the documentation of skills and monitoring of completion status. Employee self-service allows for the Learning team to ‘push’ out new training requirements so that employees can remain current in their training regardless of their work location.
• A final set of challenges that this group overcomes thorough the well governed used of RISC’s VTA suite is that of workforce logistics. Because employees are working at client facilities – often remote encampments – the majority of employees work on a rotational basis such as a “28 days on/28 days off” rotation. The long off periods means that employees may live anywhere and are often unavailable for long period of time at a stretch. VTA allows an employee to be away from the job (and computer) for an extended period of time while still tracking the training items missed while the employee was away. A critical ‘management of change’ training requirement could wait in an employee’s training plan until he/she returned from rotation so that the training can be satisfied prior to starting a new rotation.
• This working structure also poses a challenge not often considered by corporate learning organizations delivering training within a facility with a known infrastructure. Many remote production locations have very limited infrastructure, shared computers and throttled band-width that can make delivery of training – especially media rich computer-based training and virtual classrooms – difficult if not impossible. The VTA’s student portal – VTA Learner – is designed with minimize bandwidth demand and provide consistent service whether you are accessing the system from a gas plant in West Africa, a drilling encampment on the North Slope of Alaska or a production platform in the North Sea.
• This forward thinking organization has moved beyond ‘check the box’ training necessary to allow them to compete to focusing on training to build competitive advantage and reduce their own speed to market.

How can your organization integrate systematic learning management with business processes? To learn more about how VTA can be leveraged to support business continuity in your organization,contact RISC