Researchers have investigated how to prevent knowledge and skills that were learned long ago and are rarely used from getting rusty. In many industrial plants, all processes are automated. In case of a malfunction, it is important that employees have the necessary skills at their fingertips.
[...] Typically, automation makes everyday work easier for industrial employees. However, when a system malfunctions, it is important that rarely used skills can be applied instantly. A team headed by Marina Klostermann has investigated how to prevent knowledge and skills that were learned long ago and are rarely used from getting rusty. In collaboration with the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, the Work, Organizational and Business psychologists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) headed by Professor Annette Kluge evaluated 58 studies.
They've derived tips for learning new skills and for interventions for retaining skills. Their study was published in the journal Safety on 28 March 2022.
Original Source:
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
This should be applicable to many industries where automation is increasing, including the software industry. What techniques would you use to ensure that accumulated knowledge and skills are not forgotten ??
Journal Reference:
Marina Klostermann, Stephanie Conein, Thomas Felkl, et al. Factors Influencing Attenuating Skill Decay in High-Risk Industries: A Scoping Review, Safety (DOI: 10.3390/safety8020022)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @06:15PM (6 children)
Simply mandate that all workers are to know the procedures, and fire them whenever they fuck up. Replace with cheaper workers.
Works like a charm.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @06:20PM
Obviously this requires additional managers to oversee. And a new Leadership position to maintain intersectional synergy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 11 2022, @08:08PM (4 children)
Every machine we operate has an emergency stop button on it, just in case something goes wrong. Every new hire is indoctrinated to kill their machine if something goes wrong. But, the training doesn't stick, especially in the face of other indoctrination, "Don't ever change the settings on the machine, call a tech to do it!"
So - a hydraulic hose springs a leak. Starts out small, as leaks usually do, shooting a thin stream of oil about 8 feet into the air. The machine operator doesn't notice immediately, but another operator at another machine sees it. When the first operator sees the leak, she looks around, and walks off to discuss it with the second operator. They agree that A: a tech should be notified and B: the machine should be shut down - so they split up, one to summon a tech, the other to shut the machine down. Literally, minutes have passed already, and the jet of oil is growing larger, and larger.
Long story short, we pumped 150 gallons of hydraulic oil on the floor, out of a tank with a capacity of 180 gallons. The spreading oil created unsafe working conditions at surrounding work stations, so they all had to be shut down.
All because of a reluctance to actually hit an E-stop button that neither of the ladies had ever actually used before.
The operators gained a lot of experience that night, when they were required to help clean the mess up. Unfortunately, it's cheaper to replace experienced personnel with new hires at minimum wage, so that experience was lost. The next oil leak will probably be handled in much the same way. Minutes will pass while as much as 350 gallons (in some of the machines) of oil are dumped on the floor!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:04AM (1 child)
Which is why you run training drills instead of just requiring people to watch a safety video. Leaks are a known problem? Have people run an old machine with damaged tubing as part of their training. That's too expensive? When the plant is shutdown, have someone hiding near a machine and let them use a super soaker to create a fake leak. Still too expensive? Then the cost of a machine breakdown and cleanup isn't high enough to worry about people not quickly hitting the emergency stop buttons.
Training, and the related documentation on how to do the training and why it's needed, is what keeps knowledge alive for emergencies. If management is too lazy to do that, it's not your problem. Go work somewhere else that doesn't consider your life as an easily replaceable component. Want to know if the training took hold? Give yearly/monthly tests. Really, this is all basic knowledge. It seems some people managed to grow up without hearing about what a school is.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:10AM
Seriously, dude? In today's world, you are willing to risk shooting someone with a Super Soaker? That would be racist, sexist, genderist, ageist, enablist, classist, privilegist, anarchist, Marxist, and God knows what else. And, Biden would condemn you for using a ghost gun!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @07:40PM (1 child)
You fucking fired them for a procedural failing which they would surely never repeat?
Maybe there were other good reasons to want an excuse to let them go. But that seems like a learning experience you want captured.
Unreal.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 14 2022, @08:14PM
No that is not what I said. It's been over 20 years since I hired people, or fired people, or decided how much to pay them. And, no, these individuals were not fired for this particular instance. One of the ladies worked for ~7, 8, maybe 9 years, then moved on to greener pastures when she was passed over for promotion. The other lady - I can't remember why or how she left. I'm sure she continued working here for over a year, then one day, I realized that I hadn't seen her for awhile. Quit, fired, whatever, we don't keep many people for very long. For the most part, people who need a job come here, work for some months, maybe a few years, then move on.
Now, if you'll read my post above, again, you can probably see that I agree: We lost experienced people who would probably never in their lives make a similar mistake. They would have remembered how much work cleaning up was, and will go out of their way to avoid it the next time.
If it were entirely up to me, both of those ladies would have helped with clean up, endured a very mild ass chewing during that cleanup, received a cordial "thank you" when cleanup was completed, and sometime in the next couple of months, they would have seen a small raise. Both women handled themselves well, after their initial screwup, and I would have shown my gratitude if I controlled anyone's money. Alas - MBAs and "human relations" control all of our money.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @06:33PM (7 children)
Or are they assuming industrial employees don't know how to read operations manuals anymore? In that case, they could try storing the knowledge in an app.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday April 11 2022, @07:49PM (6 children)
No, they are assuming that industrial employees don't have time to read and fully understand operational manuals in the sudden event that information is needed. They are also assuming that such operational manuals don't always tell the complete story - sometimes the best way to understand how something is done is to see someone else do it.
Of course, actually TRAINING employees flies in the face of management belief that employees are replaceable like light bulbs.
They did that a long time ago, but when something came up they couldn't find anything that could read Macintosh low density floppy disks. (Point is, paper books will last longer and are more likely to be accessible in the case of an emergency).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @08:04PM (2 children)
how about managers who, you know, manage and leaders that, ya know,... lead?
where i work all the responsibility is at the bottom meanwhile the top does important secretarial work like take roll-call and nitpick vacation days
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday April 11 2022, @09:35PM (1 child)
is it more profitable? Lead on!
does it save money? Lead on!
Does it prevent the company having to spend money (right now)? Manage away!
Up-skilling and cross-training used to be part of running a business, from industrial situations to clerical positions, so people could have holidays, go to the doctor, go to training, etc etc
now, these things are to be done 'in your own time' and there is no redundancy...
Widgit management of people is now the norm... everyone's job is 'simple' so they are all easily replaceable. Qualified/certified staff are replaced with unskilled, untrained, easily replaceable minimum-wage 'operators'..
Likely NO ONE in the entire establishment knows how to fix anything.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @10:17PM
tis true
the prevailing idea is that any skills they need can be hired in on short contracts, do all the work, train everyone then go away. uhhhhh who tf is going to do that for them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:14AM
That's ultimately the issue. You can do step by step manuals with all the relevant steps, but between the time that takes to follow along with the tendency for something unforeseen to be going on that requires troubleshooting, it's a hard challenge.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 12 2022, @04:57PM (1 child)
Every single place I have ever worked at knew full well that training and onboarding is the most expensive part of employment.
And every single person who has ever trained someone at work knows that it sucks ass.
But it's cute you think this is some fresh undiscovered knowledge that those silly business people are completely unaware of!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @04:16AM
Training people is much better than not having them trained correctly, which is the usual alternative.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @07:24PM (4 children)
I have the entire cd3wd project releases downloaded, that would be a good start.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday April 11 2022, @10:29PM (2 children)
Anon, I would love to have that if you have a torrent of it. I only have a tiny fraction of it from long ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Tuesday April 12 2022, @12:01AM
Apparently his friends are bringing it back. They don't have the original domain, and it looks like they only have the documents so far, not the DVD isos.
http://www.cd3wdproject.org/ [cd3wdproject.org]
(I was the one who modded AC interesting, because I thought it was.)
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @02:00PM
Archive.org has the 2012 version as torrent.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=CDW3D+%28CDs+for+the+Third+World%29 [archive.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @02:13PM
The Global Village Construction Set may also be a useful resource for this.
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set [opensourceecology.org]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday April 11 2022, @09:44PM (8 children)
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/shrinking-the-time-to-mitigate-production-incidents [google.com]
You practice for disaster recovery. If you don't practice your disaster recovery, you have no disaster recovery (same with backups).
Honestly, I don't see anything novel or interesting in the paper at a quick glance. Emergency drills have been standard practice for ages in all industries that have to deal with emergencies.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 12 2022, @12:49AM (6 children)
Today, the only disasters that are prepared for, are those required by OSHA or other regulatory agencies. Tornado drills have been common, all through my working life, and if anything, they are getting more common. Other emergencies, not so much. MBAs don't study emergency procedures, or disaster preparedness. MBAs only see the cost in time and money required to run a drill.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 12 2022, @01:52AM (4 children)
Or by the businesses themselves. Also, the nice thing about most disaster preparation is that it can be applied for a variety of scenarios outside of the expected disaster.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 12 2022, @02:22AM (3 children)
I didn't think about that. Right now, Twitter is preparing for a hostile takeover, amirite?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 12 2022, @12:38PM (2 children)
Sometimes disaster is a point of view.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:05PM (1 child)
I wonder if this would qualify?
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/live-updates/brooklyn-subway-shooting-sunset-park-smoke-bomb/ [cbsnews.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @04:41PM
That is just a demonstration of our current levels of socioeconomic disparity, and the failures of law enforcement to police with the existing gun laws that are already on the books.
Keep in mind that Brady / other gun control orgs rank NY at #3 for gun control policy, but maybe Warren v. DC comes into play as well here.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 12 2022, @05:00PM
Yeah, it's OSHA's fault you geniuses couldn't figure out how to press the giant red stop button!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bmimatt on Tuesday April 12 2022, @04:31PM
This.
Also having a healthy corporate culture that promotes learning and shared ownership of things like:
- built-in redundancy and automated fail-overs (wherever possible),
- sane monitoring and alerting on health decline predictors, abnormal events and unexpected behavior tied to up-to-date runbooks/SOPs,
- inclusive, transparent and blameless postmortems,
- subject matter experts on hand, capable of root cause analysis,
- maintaining up to date and complete automation for rebuilds from scratch,
- continuous drift control and remediation,
- workforce development by cross-training,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @02:55AM (4 children)
Like, would it kill you to write a couple blurbs about what some snarly piece of code does and a few hints about the challenges that require that bit of code to be snarly? Or if I'm not required to understand it, can you at least give an example call or usage?
And for the love of goddess I don't need the stack trace of all 5 layers of inner exception async broker async broken! I really like how Paludis does it (alt package manager for Gentoo/primary for Exherbo), and I like Java's checked exceptions. Catch the exception at the point your code interfaces with $library and give it a meaningful application-specific message. You can also subclass Exception and throw MyAppException, then at higher levels, keep wrapping MyAppException in a new one with a broader message like "when opening the document", then when it's logged or displayed to the user, unwrap the MyAppExceptions to build an excellent error message that gives me a better idea what was happening when you dereferenced Foo and it was instead null. "When opening the document, when reading row n, when creating a BusinessObject, column Baz was null."
(Of course that implies that you don't just try to throw NULLable shit into a primitive int instead of an int? or Integer or whatever box.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:04AM (3 children)
Yellow/Red/Brown
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @04:17AM (2 children)
420 ohms, 20% ?
Good luck finding one.
I would recommend a 430 ohm, 5% as a replacement.
Did I mention I used to fix vacuum tube radios?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @08:47AM
Nah, you read it backward. 120K.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:38PM
Correct. I just fixed an early 60's Zenith AM/FM table radio. Still can't find the buzz after warming up, but I suspect the massive rectifier (diode). I've got about 150 tubes from the 40's to 70's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @04:17AM
Google image search spaced repetition curves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @11:36PM
"What techniques would you use to ensure that accumulated knowledge and skills are not forgotten?"
that's a simple one: never sleep.
also, good night Zzzzzz...