Leveraging Incremental Online Learning with Leaderful Practices

Online learning, commonly referred to as eLearning, is uniquely primed to train and deepen individual and organizational competency more efficiently than traditional training methods. The COVID-19 pandemic created a surge in organizations adopting online learning to substitute for traditional, in-classroom training. The question now becomes how this rapid shift to online learning will continue to change the future of education and training. What impact can we expect this to have long-term on continued process safety training and how we teach the next generation of leaders?

This paper examines the role and impact of eLearning on the process safety community and why it can foster a stronger generation of new process safety leaders. Our experience suggests that this shift will facilitate a new model where process safety professionals are empowered by the ability to set their own pace and learn incrementally, accelerating competency levels individually and professionally. A learning management system (LMS) case study demonstrates how incremental online learning promotes competency and leaderful development to strengthen safety culture and performance. This approach complements Vision 20/20 (as proposed by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) in 2011) to reach perfect process safety.

Introduction

In 2011, the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) set forth an ambitious vision for the global process safety industry to “demonstrate what perfect process safety will look like when it is championed by industry”. Its goal was to significantly motivate our industry to impact safety performance by 2020. The framework consisted of five tenets, and one of the five tenets was intentional competency development. This competency development was defined by CCPS as “understanding competency expectations, providing educational resources, and allowing time for people to build competency”. In other words, this tenet called for more learning and a more substantial commitment to training and development.