Writing and Updating the Technical Standards for Response Staff
OSRL's response team comprises several positions. We have a long established training programme for Responders, and this year, Aaron is leading the re-write of the occupation standards for all response, training, and consultancy staff. This re-write moves completion of the standards to a modular approach and incorporates maintenance of competency for long term assurance.
He is also reviewing the training for our Duty Managers and Incident Managers. This revised training looks holistically at the technical competency required and enabling skills needed to maximise applying these technical skills. This has included particular focus on leadership and critical decision-making under acute pressure.
Subject Matter Expertise Framework
Aaron is continuing with the development of OSRL's subject matter expertise framework. This framework is for technical staff passionate about becoming industry experts in niche fields within oil spill preparedness and response. The framework allows us to more clearly measure the deep technical expertise of our most technically competent staff. This will deliver three key benefits;
- It supplements and supports our existing competency and job frameworks, allowing our staff more scope to pursue career pathways in technical disciplines they are passionate about
- It gives industry greater access to our discipline specialists and subject matter experts
- It improves our structures for developing and sharing knowledge outside and within the organisation, ensuring we remain at the forefront of good practice.
Transforming Industry
We aim pull all of the 'pieces’ of technical and behavioural competency together into a comprehensive and systematic framework sharing this with industry to grow together. People will always be our greatest asset, so we recruit carefully and spend considerable time, money and energy developing them to be the best they can be – developing ‘competency’. Whilst we talk about developing competency and have various technical and behavioural frameworks already, we lack a holistic approach crucial to an individual's whole life development and ensures organisational agility. For us, ‘agility’ is achieved by having many individuals who can act effectively in various response situations, whether in the field or in the command centre, during an exercise or an actual incident.
Competency is a combination of observable and measurable abilities, knowledge, skills and personal attributes that enable a person (or an organisation) to act effectively in a job or situation. High individual competency ultimately results in organisational success.
