Training, Awareness, and Competence

In general, the standard states that “Personnel……shall be competent…”, which is a bit of a ‘no-brainer’ isn’t it?
It also includes a note to say this includes tasks that indirectly affect whether the product meets requirements, such as any involved in the quality management system. This means that when you are determining needs, providing training, and keeping records, you need to include the requirements of the quality management system as well as the product or services you provide.
The specific requirements are to:

a) determine the necessary competence for personnel performing work affecting conformity to product requirements,
b) where applicable, provide training or take other actions to achieve the necessary competence,
c) evaluate the effectiveness of the actions taken,
d) ensure that its personnel are aware of the relevance and importance of their activities and how they contribute to the achievement of the quality objectives, and
e) maintain appropriate records of education, training, skills and experience.

Those first three look very familiar: a) plan, b) do, c) check
Not terribly difficult. Just work out what you need, see what you have, and then fill in the gaps. Check to see it is working, and keep records to show you do it. This misses d) which is about making sure people know how their activities fit into the whole scheme of the business and its quality management system
As far as ISO9001 is concerned, you don’t have to document the process – you just have to do it and keep records to show that you do. (But you can document it you want to and an overview of the process can be helpful.)

Work out what you need

It’s very common to think about this when you write a job advertisement. You can use this mindset when writing job descriptions and determining competency requirements. Start with the responsibilities of the role and then think about what skills are needed to fulfil them. You’ll need to add in requirements that wouldn’t normally be included in a job ad, like knowledge specific to your organisation that’s provided in on-the-job training or induction, e.g., “Awareness of our Quality Management System”.
If you’re starting from scratch, one approach is to ask everyone to describe their own duties, and what skills are needed – just make sure you tell them why, so they know you’re not trying to replace them! You can then pass those descriptions up and down a level on the organisation chart to get a different perspective on the expectations for that role.
Knowing what you are expected to do makes it easier to know when you are doing a good job, and that increases employee satisfaction.

See what you have

Education, training, certificates, licences, experience, skills, awareness,… you’ll want to have records for these.
This is obvious when you are bringing in a new hire and filling out a new personnel file, but you’ll need to have a way to track this for your existing employees whose knowledge increases over time with experience and training.
It is common to add these kind of records to a personnel file, but this doesn’t allow you to get an overview of the assets and gaps, and tracking expiry dates is nigh impossible. Adding these competencies to a list, spreadsheet or database will make life easier.

Fill in the Gaps

Gap Analysis is where you compare the ‘needs’ to the ‘haves’, and find the holes.
This is pretty straightforward when there’s not too many employees and not too many competencies, but it can get quite tricky as the numbers increase.
You can use a database (e.g., Quality Systems Toolbox), spreadsheets, or a simple table:

Water collector tasks	Jack	Jill
operating the well	x	x
manual handling	x
first aid		x

Here’s an example of a table “Responsibility Matrix, Training Needs Analysis” included in the Environmental Management System Tool from the Australian Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities

Once you’ve identified the holes, make a plan for filling them. This doesn’t have to be lots of dollars spent on formal external training. Other methods are perfectly acceptable: internal training, classroom, on-the-job instruction, adhoc/informal, mentoring, … Whatever works for you. Just keep records, which is easy for formal training, but a bit harder to remember to do for informal methods.

Check to see it worked

Training does not necessarily equal learning.
Adult Education specialist, Hadiya Nuriddin at www.examiner.com, gives a great example:
“I have received over 20 hours of cooking instruction and it may shock you to learn that I am still not a great cook. How could this be? I showed up and completed all the assigned tasks. I nodded, smiled, and laughed on cue. And yet, whenever I cook a meal, a real chef somewhere dies inside.”
and has some good tips on ‘How to get more learning out of training’.
You will need to assess whether the training you provided, whether it was internal or external, has been effective in closing the gap you identified. In some cases this assessment be be provided in the form of a licence or certificate from the external training body.
For internal training you can use other methods:

• Direct supervision of work by a competent operator,
• Extra inspection of the employee’s work,
• A written test after the training,
• A practical test after the training,
• a combination of the above.

Particularly for external training, Hadiya Nuriddin suggests that "managers and employees should discuss the course and what was learned. This does not mean asking how the course went and accepting, “Fine,” as an answer. It means having a meaningful discussion about how the material contributes to the employee’s and the company’s success."

Awareness

This seems to be the fuzziest one, but it’s not really. Awareness is something that employees need to know and would usually be part of the initial job orientation/induction. For some activities it won’t be obvious how they affect the customer and on quality management, or affect safety or environmental impacts. Having an overview of your processes (e.g. a process map) and top level process documentation can help define where the activities fit.
Awareness of the quality/safety/environmental management system is usually is taken care of by in-house training that should include:

• the quality / safety / environmental policy,
• significant quality / safety / environmental aspects of their activities and related work instructions,
• objectives and targets,
• their quality / safety / environmental management system roles and responsibilities,
• safety / environmental emergency action plan,
• where/how to access information,
• how to report incidents,
• how changes can be requested (e.g. a document change request)
• how updates are posted,

Changes occur and people forget, so don’t restrict awareness training to induction.

Records

If you are managing training then you’ll have the following records:

• written job descriptions and their competencies,
• paper or electronic copies of licences, certificates, training records, etc, and also the listing you created.
• meeting notes with attendees listed (e.g., for a safety briefings),
• the gap analysis (table / list / matrix),
• training dates (a plan, a calendar), and
• training records once training has been completed.

(All managed according to your written records management procedure).

Rinse and Repeat

Roles and responsibilities change over time and employees develop new skills, so you will need to repeat the analysis periodically. Conducting regular Performance Reviews is one method.
Also, new needs can arise if the business decides it wants to offer new services, has changed the way things are done (e.g., changes to a process, new software systems), or there have been changes to regulatory or customer requirements. If not otherwise, these changes are likely to come up as part of Management Review.