The mission was to train over a thousand people over the course of two weeks with only an hour allotted for each session and to make it meaningful. So, when designing training we have to think about these types of constraints. Typical constraints around ROI involve:
- How many people can you train at once?
- How long does the training have to be to accomplish the goal?
- How engaging and inclusive is the training session?
- Where will it be conducted?
- Who will develop the content?
- Is it going to be worth the time and effort put into it?
- Will the evolution hold up to scrutiny?
Targeted Organizational Goal: Inform contract workforce (close to 50% have never been in a nuclear power plant before) of human error prevention tools used at a Nuclear power station, and show them how to apply them to prevent errors that could lead to an event.
Financial savings: The class is designed for any qualified instructor to teach, and not specific to the talents of the instructor, where we are sometimes limited.
Ease of instruction: From the instructor’s point of view – Some instructors are not comfortable teaching in such a critical arena, but this class has accessibility and is easy to teach. When the videos are playing, the instructor has time to gather thoughts and prepare for the facilitation between them. Anxiety is almost expected as an instructor in the nuclear training realm, and this class offers little stress to the instructor.
Demonstration of achievement of organizational goal: By using videos created
by the workforce using human error prevention tools, we are able to demonstrate to incoming temporary workers pieces of the culture they are about to work in and reinforce through instruction lessons learned from previous refueling outages.
Time savings: The Film Festival can train up to 60 students at a time
(only limited by room size), and in previous pre-outage human performance training classes had to be split up with 3-9 students per instructor when conducting any type of activity.
Seven original videos were created by the workforce to be used in a film-festival DLA with the intent of showing incoming refuel-outage contractors HU error prevention tools used as Wolf Creek, and how to use them. The video content had to meet specific criteria, including which tool they were showing, length, and why their department values that particular tool. Students walk into a movie theater environment with chairs placed with one major aisle
down the middle with floor and chair labels to match the ticket number what students get on the way in. They are greeted by an usher over a small red carpet and a leather rope with stanchions to be allowed into the theater - they get their name added to the attendance list on a clipboard and they receive their ballot and seat ticket (which they need to get peer checked). The smell of popcorn permeates the air, as attendants are waiting for students to follow the ballot steps and order popcorn using three-way communication as directed in the ballot. The training leads off with an introduction video followed by a safety video reminding to not drive while talking on a phone and to not walk and text. Wolf Creek employees were excited to participate in making these videos from the concepts to the acting to the editing; the process was engaging and fun for the workers, as they were reminded how important error-prevention tools are in our workplace. Each video was designed to show common situations contractors may find themselves in and how to use the pertinent HU tool to be successful.
Students participate using five HU tools within the training activity, including:
• Self-checking your name on the attendance sheet
• Peer-checking someone else is in the correct seat and getting a peer check to ensure you are in the correct seat
• Using Three-Way Communication to order popcorn
• Participating in a Pre-Job Brief prior to grading the videos
• Place-keeping the videos in the Ballot/Program
The training is very inclusive and engaging on a large scale. Greater than 95% of students (Over 1000 students) indicated with comments that they prefer this type of training and that it helped them understand human performance error-prevention tools better. This training has Affective elements that are typically missing from nuclear training. The videos and the instruction offered why using error-reduction tools should be valued by the students, and not just by telling them, but by showing them.
