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Our activation procedure including contact details and forms for activation, in addition to equipment stockpile and aviation status reports can be found here.

Emergency Contact Numbers

  • Europe, Middle East & Africa

    +44 (0)23 8033 1551

  • Asia Pacific

    +65 6266 1566

  • Americas

    +1 954 983 9880

Please note that:

Response services are guaranteed ONLY for Members. Non-members are not guaranteed a response and will be required to sign a Non-member contract. Services and rates differ. Duty managers can be contacted for exercises.

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Oil Spill Response Limited Oil Spill Response Limited
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About

Technical Competence

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The technical competence of our people is core to OSRL and central to everything we do. 

 

This role is about developing and setting the technical competency standards for OSRL personnel and ensuring they have the knowledge, skill and experience to excel as oil spill experts. 

 

In addition to setting the standards, this role focuses on managing our OPITO-approved competency assurance system and subject matter expertise framework, ensuring we have robust processes to measure and develop our people's technical expertise across our business.

 

Meet The Team

Aaron joined OSRL after several years as a Deck Officer in the Merchant Navy. Since joining OSRL, Aaron has attended numerous major oil spills in Africa, Europe, North America and the Middle East, taking on supervisory and technical advisor roles. 

Aaron joined the training team after completing a secondment in the position of Africa Regional Representative. Aaron developed and delivered training on the full spectrum of IMO, DECC and ICS courses while in the training team. Aaron has also worked on consultancy projects providing advice and support to the South African and Falkland Island Governments on their National Oil Spill Contingency Plans (NOSCP). 

Following his time in the training team, Aaron joined the technical team. Here he is responsible for the development and assurance of OSRL's response staff, providing governance on project management, and for maintaining and updating OSRL's internal resilience. 

 

Aaron also holds a Master's in Maritime Law and is an ICS Canada accredited trainer.

Current Projects

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; 

  1. 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
  2. It gives industry greater access to our discipline specialists and subject matter experts
  3. 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.  

Additional Activities

As part of his role Aaron also acts as OSRL’s Project Management Office. This requires him to provide oversight and governance of projects and support project managers. This has resulted in reworking our internal project management procedures reflecting lessons learned and aligning them closer to industry good practice. 

 

Working with Nicola Fisher (Global head of IT), OSRL’s Resilience documents have been reviewed and updated with training and exercises being delivered for our Crisis Management Teams (CMT) and Business Continuity Teams (BCT) in Southampton. This follows the extended activation of the CMT and BCT to address the challenges of COVID and Ukraine's conflict. 

 

Aaron also continues to support the training and consultancy department with delivery of Incident Management System (IMS) training, crisis management training and developing strategic approaches to our members' competency management challenges.