Jonny Millard, managing director of UK Fire Door Training, looks at why people working across the built environment need a clearer way to demonstrate the skills and experience they’ve built up over their careers.
One of the things I’ve learned from spending so much time with installers is that experience can be quite difficult to put down on paper.
I see it particularly clearly in the fire door industry because those are the people I work with every week, but the same challenge exists across the built environment.
Someone might have spent 20 years in their trade and, in that time, worked on hundreds of jobs, used all sorts of different products and come across problems you’d only encounter through physically doing the work.
Ask the people who work with them whether they’re good at their job and they’ll probably give you a fairly quick answer. Ask that same person to prove everything they’re competent to do and it becomes a much harder question.
They’ll have qualifications and training certificates, perhaps some practical assessments and records of previous jobs, but a lot of what they know has been built up through years of experience.
Their capability may be well understood by the people they work alongside without ever having been formally recorded, and that’s becoming increasingly important as the built environment gets to grips with competence.
Since the Building Safety Act, we’ve become much more familiar with skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours (SKEB), and our recent research suggests awareness is relatively high. Some 78% of respondents knew what the Building Safety Act was and 71% felt confident in their understanding of SKEB.
Where people were much less certain was how they were supposed to evidence it. Some 59% said they didn’t know how to evidence their competence, while only 32% felt clear about what acceptable evidence should look like.
For me, there’s something quite telling in those figures. People are increasingly aware that they may be expected to demonstrate competence, but many are still unsure what they would need to produce to do that.
What counts as evidence?
Training certificates are naturally part of the answer. In our research, 85% of those who felt they could evidence their competence said they would use them, which makes sense because certificates are one of the few forms of evidence people tend to have readily available.
The challenge is how we capture everything that happens around and after that training. Someone might complete a course and then spend the next five years applying what they learned across dozens of projects. During that time they’ll gain experience with different products and site conditions, encounter problems they haven’t seen before and develop the judgement that comes from doing the job repeatedly.
If we want a meaningful picture of that person’s competence five years later, all of that experience is relevant. The work they’ve completed, the experience they’ve gained and what others have seen them do all help build a picture of what they’re capable of today.
I see this a lot through the people we train. Someone can come to us with years of experience behind them and a huge amount of practical knowledge, yet very little of it exists in a form they could easily show to somebody else. You can also have plenty of certificates without them giving you the full picture of what you’ve been doing since you completed that training.
That’s why I think the evidence of competence needs to build throughout somebody’s career, reflecting the experience they continue to gain through the work they do.
Making experience visible
Across the built environment, a lot of what we know about people’s competence is already understood informally. Managers and supervisors work alongside people over time and build up a pretty good picture of their strengths and experience, as well as the work they can be trusted to carry out.
That professional judgement is valuable and it’s something anyone who has managed a team will recognise. You get to know who has come across a particular problem before, who has plenty of experience in a certain area and who you would be comfortable putting on a particular job.
The difficulty comes when somebody else needs to understand what that person can do. If they move employer, work under a different supervisor or need to demonstrate their competence to a client or contractor, years of knowledge that everybody around them took for granted can suddenly become surprisingly difficult to show.
I think we need to give people a way of building a record of competence throughout their career, so the evidence develops as they do. As they gain experience, learn new skills, work with new products or take on different responsibilities, that record should develop with them.
For somebody who has spent 20 years in their trade, it would make the experience they’ve built much more visible. They could see what they can already demonstrate and where further development might be useful, while having a record that can follow them as their career progresses.
There’s a benefit for employers too. If much of what a business knows about its workforce sits with individual supervisors and managers, it can be difficult to get a clear view across the organisation. Capturing that knowledge gives employers a better understanding of the skills and experience they already have within the business and stronger evidence to support the decisions they make about who carries out particular work.
Our research found that 70% of respondents said competence or SKEB was rarely or never discussed on site or within their organisation. I think that tells us something about where the industry is. We’ve become much more familiar with the language of competence over the past few years, but for a lot of people it still feels removed from the work they’re doing every day.
If we want that to change, the conversation needs to feel relevant to the people doing the work. The people I meet through our training tend to have fairly practical questions about the experience they’ve already built, how they can demonstrate it and what they may need to do next.
Those questions go far beyond fire door installation. Across the built environment, there are people with decades of knowledge and experience behind them who would struggle to pull together the evidence that shows what they can do.
After spending an entire career building that competence, proving it shouldn’t be the difficult part.
Find out more at: https://ukfiredoortraining.com/
