COGENT Recognises "Good Practice" in Competence Assurance System

Published:   15th Jun 2004, 09:13

We have launched a "virtual" Competence Assurance System (CAS) aimed at ensuring workers throughout the oil and gas industry carry out their duties safely and efficiently.

The online system, capability core® (Competent Organisational REsource), comprises a virtual portfolio and training recording system which retains documentation, provides real time key performance indicators, management reports as well as maintaining focus on IiP (Investors in People) objectives.

It is the first such product to be accepted by the newly formed sector skills Council for the Oil & Gas Extraction, Chemical Manufacturing and Petrochemical Industries (COGENT) as "Good Practice". Its development is the result of a two-year cross-industry initiative aimed at reducing the bureaucracy, paper work and huge administration cost associated with traditional standards based competence systems.

Colin Black, Business Development Manager, here at tycom, explains: "We undertook extensive research which highlighted the fact that it can be extremely costly and difficult for companies to implement paper-based competence assurance systems.

Large organisations spend significant sums on complex CAS's, whereas more often than not Small to Medium Sized Enterprises - which are under intense pressure to implement CASs and provide records of personnel development and training - cannot afford to do so and therefore implement expensive and labour intensive paper-based systems."

He continued: "Our vision, therefore, was to develop an industry standard system that would quickly and cost-effectively deliver real business benefits to those operational staff responsible for ensuring that personnel working offshore are competent to carry our their duties safely.

capability core® allows SMEs to import existing standards of competence from the S/NVQ framework and elsewhere. It enables them to add in their own specific requirements, train assessors and have a fully operational, audit-friendly competence assurance, training and recording system in a matter of days."

Industry experts, trade associations and competence assurance specialists provided the specification for the computerised CAS and over 30 companies provided peer review. As a result capability core® has been developed with the user in mind.

The functionality utilises pre-programmed drop down lists and pre-formatted documentation. As such, manual input is kept to a minimum and the system moves seamlessly from planning and gathering evidence to assessment recording.

Tom McIntosh, COGENT, Team Leader, said: "As a sector skills council it is a major part of our role to promote the use of standards of competence. capability core® is an excellent tool for facilitating this. Accordingly, COGENT is pleased to recognise capability core® as an example of good practice. We expect the benefits for the industry to be significant".

The importance of safety within the industry and the development of initiatives that implement good practices was also highlighted by Paul Blakeley, Director & General Manager of Talisman Energy (UK) Ltd., during the recent LOGIC conference, held in Aberdeen.

Mr Blakeley sent a clear signal that although improvements in safety have been made, there is still much to do throughout the industry, stating that "safety performance will be critical to the successful delivery of the 2010 PILOT vision.".

He said: "To reduce current lost time injury frequency levels, companies throughout the supply chain must ensure their staff are competent to carry out their duties in a safe and effective manner. One way of achieving this is to share good practice.".