Prove Learning ROI Like a Regulator | Matt Lloyd Davies

Well, in the civil nuclear sector in the UK, there's a concept called SQEP, which stands for suitably qualified and experienced person, and that was a really important part of what capability meant in practice.

Now, under the nuclear site license in the UK, organizations have to ensure that people who are carrying out activities and tasks that might affect nuclear safety are suitably qualified and experienced to do that work.

Sure.

Sure.

Yeah.

So as an inspector, part of my job was looking at how an organization could actually demonstrate that.

So it wasn't just enough to tell me that, you know, somebody had attended a training course or that they'd been in the organization for 10 years.

I wanted to understand what the role required, how the organization had defined the necessary competence, um, what training and experience that person had, how they'd been assessed and so on, and whether that there was evidence that they were actually capable of performing the task that they'd been assigned.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes that meant looking at training records and competence matrices, but sometimes it meant looking at the justification for why somebody had been deemed SQEP for a particular task.

And also, quite often it meant talking to the individual themselves and asking them to explain what they did, why they did it, and how they understood the safety significance of their work.

And that really is one of the things that I carried with me from regulation into learning.

Mm-hmm.

So a qualification is evidence, uh, training completion is evidence, experience is evidence, but none of those things on their own necessarily prove capability.

So what you're really trying to establish is, do we have good reason to believe this person can perform this particular task in this particular environment to the standard that we need?

I think you've already named some of these, Matt, but what did organizations often try to present to you as proof of capability, and what did you actually need to see? I mean, you talked about going a level deeper and having a conversation with the individual assumed to have those skills, and you might challenge them on some of those.

But what did organizations offer to you mistakenly as proof? Was it simply a, an Excel printout of hours engaged in, in learning and, "Hey, here's the certifications or courses this person took"? Was it really that simple, or were they trying to offer any other evidence?

Well, you're right.

The easiest evidence to produce is often evidence of activity, so things like policies- plans, uh, training completions, investment figures.

And those things aren't meaningless, but they're evidence that something was done, not necessarily evidence that the organization had become more capable.

Sure.

So what I wanted was a, a stronger change.

What capability are you claiming to have? What does good performance look like? How have you tested or exercised it? Now, that's a much harder standard, but it's also much more useful because it moves the conversation away from what was purchased or documented-

Right

... and towards what people and teams can actually do.