Leveraging Incremental Online Learning with Leaderful Practices – A Perspective on Achieving Perfect Process Safety Competency

Online learning, commonly referred to as e-learning, is uniquely primed to train and deepen individual and organizational competency more efficiently than traditional training methods. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is considered a catalyst for the global surge in online learning, this sector was expected to grow significantly due to telecommunications advancements that increased affordability and high adoption rates worldwide in digital services and devices. This paper examines the role and impact of online learning on the process safety community and why it can foster a stronger generation of new process safety leaders.

With students returning to classrooms and employees returning to work in their physical offices, the question 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? 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 as well as professionally. It provides an opportunity for the process safety community to embrace a leaderful organization, which develops “four Cs” of concurrent, collective, collaborative, and compassionate leaders and endorses mutual and continuously learning (Raelin, 2005). In short, accessibility and adaptability of online learning encourage competency and leadership.

A case study will explore the concepts of learning incrementally, competency development, and leaderful practices. Our case study will present how an online learning management system (LMS) with training structured as building blocks improves overall competency specific to a particular skill set. It also demonstrates scalability for large organizations, including cross-functional teams beyond the immediate scope of process safety, strengthening safety culture and performance. This online training perspective serves to complement the Vision 20/20 (as proposed by the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) in 2011) to further reach perfect process safety.