Why Traditional Training Methods Fail in the Modern Mining Industry
Every training coordinator and mine manager knows how important training is when a new employee joins a company. Whether they have prior experience or not, they are not familiar with your machines, your protocols, or your SOPs.
A recent McKinsey survey shows that 86% of mining executives find it harder to recruit and retain the talent they need. Being able to recruit, train, and preserve a team of frontline workers is every bit as challenging in 2024.
Traditionally, companies don't look for a ton of qualifications when hiring a frontline worker, and often all it takes is a driver's license. So, when it comes to employee safety and company profitability, training becomes non-negotiable.
In this article, we will cover:
What are the traditional training methods?
Classroom training and PowerPoints
These are one-sided lectures, handbooks, and manuals that cover the theoretical basics and are convenient for compliance purposes.
Drawbacks:
Presentations rarely sit well with trainees. They fail to grab attention, there is barely any active participation, and as a result, the workers walk away with little practical knowledge on machine operations, maintenance, or safety protocols in the field. Even if they learn some useful information, they don't actively engage with it, so they have a hard time retaining it.
Ride-alongs
Probably the most common, this learn-on-the-job approach pairs every trainee with an experienced operator for a temporary apprenticeship. The trainee learns everything from hazard awareness to equipment maintenance only by observing the senior.
Drawbacks:
Operators typically work under high pressure to deliver on their targets and are unable to dedicate themselves 100% to training a newbie in end-to-end job responsibilities. This time crunch results in hurried training, leaving the junior with incomplete knowledge and a lack of confidence to do their job productively.
External training
Some companies have the budget to hire external trainers for a few weeks' worth of training, covering the fundamentals for all new hires at a time.
Drawbacks:
Given the high turnover rate in the mining industry, external training becomes hardly sustainable due to its one-off nature. External trainers are also likely unfamiliar with your company values and SOPs. Worst of all, they don't leave behind any material to fall back on, so the workers are left without resources to brush up their knowledge after some time.
Equipment simulators
Physical simulator machines are state-of-the-art tools that let trainees practice their skills and get comfortable running the machine without the risk of injury or damage.
Drawbacks:
While there is nothing better in building motor skills in a safe environment than a simulator, they are built for practice, not education. While they are great tools to understand the mechanics, they lack the fundamentals like machine inspection and safety maintenance protocols. Because of that, simulator training always needs to be combined with strong theoretical and maintenance training. These tools are also very expensive, with a standard simulator costing anywhere between $250,000 and $1,000,000.
How do these drawbacks impact your business?
These training solutions are imperfect to say the least. But these failures go beyond just incomplete training and pose real, significant threats, including:
领英推荐
Increased Downtime
Decision-makers know how detrimental unplanned downtime can be, and recent studies show companies are losing up to 8% of their annual revenues because of it.
A lack of proper training means your workers put the machines at risk and increase the chances of machines going out of operation far more often than necessary.
Avoidable Damages
When improperly trained employees handle heavy machinery worth millions of dollars, there is a higher risk of damage to the machines. Fixing these damages is expensive, and leads to added losses that could have been avoided with proper training in the first place.
Safety Risks
The mining industry is inherently risky, and the lack of comprehensive training leads to employees who don't learn safety protocols, exposing themselves to injuries, burns, and in extreme cases, death.
Lack of transparency
Classroom training and traditional eLearnings make it almost impossible to precisely assess workers' competency levels, creating challenges in finding and fixing competency gaps until a problem arises.
With such a high risk of crucial failures and crises, it’s easy to see why proper training is a necessity.
So…What can you do to improve your training methods?
While there are benefits to traditional training methods like ride-alongs and physical simulators, they are not comprehensive training solutions. This is where next-gen eLearning tools like GembaPro can help.
Building an end-to-end training program
Think of your presentations, SOPs, and manuals as the first step of learning, and experiences like simulations and ride-alongs as the last step. This leap is only possible when trainees are able to create a mental image and build the skillset they need to do the job.
They need to have the knowledge and confidence to visualize their day-to-day tasks before they get behind the wheel — here is where equipment-focused eLearning modules with visually rich videos can help bridge that gap.
Helping along the way
Leveraging eLearning enables workers to access the information they need to learn from their phones or laptops whenever they want. It's easier for them to revise and retain knowledge by themselves rather than cramming everything into a 2-week training program.
Boosting active participation
Plain old presentations are boring, but engaging with interactive and visually rich learning materials invites your workers to pay attention. Instead of snoozing at the screen, the learners can play around with the digital replicas and use the 3D models to practice their skills on their own. This way, when they handle the machine in real-life working conditions, they will already know the basics and gain confidence much faster.
Learning insights
Instead of assessing each worker's competency with individual supervision, platforms like GembaPro enable deep knowledge assessment with quizzes and simulations. And to make the learning insights actionable, we go beyond a simple pass/fail grade—we provide deep learning insights across the five competencies map with actionable learning suggestions.
Training is the first and arguably the most important step to ensuring a productive working environment. Especially when it comes to the mining industry, it is an investment that pays dividends in the long term.
With GembaPro, you enable your workforce with the knowledge they need, in a way they will understand.