Systematic Approach to Training

Implementation of the Systematic Approach to Training (SAT) at Sellafield, the UK’s largest nuclear facility

Business Time Project Coordinator
Energy Start date: 2017 Sellafield Ltd

 

Challenge

The Sellafield site is responsible for safely delivering decommissioning of the UK’s nuclear legacy as well as nuclear fuel recycling and the management of low, high and intermediate level nuclear waste activities on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

Sellafield is safely delivering nuclear decommissioning, waste management and commercial operations and, by continually raising its performance, it will achieve the NDA’s vision to become the site and workforce of choice for potential new missions.

Sellafield is an extremely large site with circa 10,000 personnel all of which require some form of training. These personnel are required to perform tasks which range from daily operational and maintenance tasks on plant equipment through to emergency procedures which have to be performed without hesitance and accurately.

With such a wide range of tasks, each with varying levels of difficulty and criticality, a systematic analysis is required before launching the development of training material to ensure that priority decisions are being made in terms of safety and financial investment. The existing training delivered at Sellafield had not previously had the benefit of this analysis.

Approach

We deployed a team of 15-20 training developers and SAT specialists across the site in Cumbria, UK, within each of the Sellafield training teams. Our SAT specialists worked alongside the heads of training with our experienced developers working within the existing training teams.

  • Advice and guidance on the implementation of SAT
  • Job and task analysis
  • Design and development of training materials
  • Advice on media and methods
  • Coaching and mentoring of the Sellafield training community.

Conclusion

Work is currently ongoing as this is an iterative continuous improvement project, however, the initial two-year contract is complete. It is recognised by Sellafield that its training material and development processes have been significantly improved already, and we continue to work under the one-year extension, which has now been approved, to deliver further benefit to the highly capable training developers employed by Sellafield within its training team.

We are confident that the Sellafield personnel now have an enhanced training programme which is capable of delivering a safe and sustainable environment in which they can deliver their varied and critical objectives.