Training competency for Rail Industry Worker training at scale can be a real challenge to rail operators with high demand for permanent and temporary rail industry worker training. These rail industry worker training courses are the foundation and initial mandatory course for any worker seeking track access or corridor acces to safely access the rail corridor. This rail industry worker training may be called different things in different jurisdictions such as the RIW Supervised Worker training, Track Access training, Train Track Safety Awareness training, and the Safely Access the Rail Corridor training for rail industry workers (RIW).

For example, the Supervised Worker (SW) training is a mandatory requirement for all Rai lIndustry Work RIW cardholders Western Australia with the Public Transport Authority (PTA) as seen here. In some situations this rail industry worker training is accredited, and sometimes non-accredited, but is usually linked or mapped to rail industry worker national training competencies.

Supervised worker training challenges

When there are many works in the rail corridor, many new workers to the industry may be required to undergo this ‘base level’ training.

The demand for construction workers on the rail corridor may be very high in certain situations. With multiple construction projects ongoing requiring multiple shutdown, or block of access, compounding requirements for new workers needing to be inducted may be required.

Hundreds of workers may need supervised worker induction training specific to the state or regional rules. It is not adequate to have supervised worker or tack access induction training from one region to apply to another, the track access base level training is required for each region.

There are also requirements for re-accreditation of ongoing workers for the supervised worker track access training required, as the accreditation lasts for only a number of short years.

The traditional approach is for class-room based full-day training for the supervised worker track access training module.

The supervised worker is the base level requirement, as workers in the railway corridor are supervised by track force protection officers.

These supervised training courses may be booked out for months in advance.

However the training supervisors may get urgent requests that dozens of workers to be trained in days. How is this done? A large amount of admin to move pre-booked trainees off of training programs to swap urgent trainees in.

When there are few rail projects on, ‘trickle feeding’ rail industry worker track acces

This urgency may be required because a need maybe suddenly identified. For example a heritage or cultural site or artefacts are found during the demolition of a rail station or asset. This may reuire a specialist heritage and cultural subject matter expert (SME) to come into the rail corridor and project site urgently to review the situation – within 48-72 hours.

However if there is no quality training accessible within the timeframe, then the project experience delays, extra project managment and administration etc.

Another example is where, say, 30 new people are needed within the ral corridor within in a week, then pre-booked people are moved off of courses – causing confusing and difficulty. Operators may need to have trainers working all weekends to meet the demand, and still not keep up.

Similarly rail industry workers may be brought in from another region, country or state who will also need to do the local rail industry worker track access training and induction. Every day and even every hour these resources are not mobilised costs the projects and operators dearly – many thousands of dollars per resource per day.

In particular with so many shut downs and block of lines, from so many projects running, very short timelines with large volumes of new and possibly returning rail industry workers may require induction – sometimes for multiple shutdowns across projects in the same timeframe.

The business and financial impacts of these situations include:

• Classroom capacity is itself limited to the sites and number of trainers
• Significant project and operational costs associated with delay to working
• The opportunity cost for qualified trainers doing low level training – they could be doing higher level technical training of much higher value
• Accessibility of training and the travel costs and duplications with travelling to a physical classroom
• The consistency of training across time and different trainers
• The quality of training with a classroom ‘death by powerpoint’ approach.
• Compliance proofs to regulators like ONRSR (Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator)
• Qulity assurance with mapping to the relevant regulatory competency
• Currency with new rail hazards awareness and other regulatory requirements
• Turnaround times for updates to the training to be rolled out across trainers – training the trainers
• Assuring the Management of Change (MoC) process is carried out correctly
• Ensuring the training is proportionate to the hazards
• Easily managing the assessment process – so pieces of paper are not sitting in intrays for weeks and months for data entry into a Learning Management System (LMS)
• Meeting the suitable qualification criteria – such as the AQF criteria (Australian Qualification Framework criteria)
• Ensuring the knowledge elements and the performance elements of the supervised worker training are covered suitably

CGI Solutions for Rail Industry Worker Training for Track Access

Benefits

• Can be built, customised and deployed in 12 weeks or less for rail industry worker training.
• Can be built and customised for typical and atypical or specialist situations.
• Rail industry worker training mapped to national and other competencies.
• Once built, can be used any number of times for rail industry worker training
• Is instantly accessible with a login on any device.
• Can be built for any device – tablet, laptop, computer best for screen real estate, can be customised for phone sized rail training.
• Directly records results into any connected LMS (learning management system) via an API – no need for manual entry or extra administration.
• Gives high fidelity performance feedback on rail worker trainee response times, errors, and wrong responses for deeper learning research and fidelity.
• Is readily updatable and redployed for instant access updates.
• Components are re-usable for other rail industry worker training modules.
• Can include performance ‘machanical’ and behavioural learning on screen as well as informational
• Can be more engaging than classrooms with 3D animated CGI scenarios, characters and situations.
• Gives higher cadence and immediacy to questions and answers.
• Gives higher ability for levels of complexity and competency.
• Removes classroom peer pressures.
• Removes the need for travel, downtime and covering rosters.
• Can require second tier logins and validations to ensure the trainee worker is actually doing the test – eg required to do it with a trainer onsite who also has to login.
• Can have multiple tiers for refreshers and re-accreditations.
• Can improve customer brand and loyalty with modern CGI based training.
• Frees up quailfied trainers to be doing more advanced and complex work.
• Supplements the demand for trainers who are scarce and may be retiring from the workforce.