We will always have a plan
We will always have a plan
Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference: What I took from the supervisor competency review
Matt Way, Mapped Out Solutions. Queensland First Class Certificate of Competency holder.
I went to the Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference in August expecting the supervisor session to confirm what we already thought, and for the most part it did. What I was not expecting was that it would put numbers on something we had only been able to argue from experience, or that it would name a gap nobody has a plan to close yet.
This is what I took from it, and why it changed how we talk about our own training.
The University of Queensland presented the findings of a cross-sector competency review on 18 August. The project was commissioned by the Commissioner at the time, on behalf of Queensland’s two mining safety advisory committees, the Coal Mining Safety and Health Advisory Committee and the Mining Safety and Health Advisory Committee. It exists because supervisor competency is objective one on both of their five-year strategic plans.
It is worth noting what that means. Both committees have supervisor competency as their first objective, and the work to define what that competency actually involves has only reported this year.
The method was four-part. Fifty-six supervisor position descriptions were analysed, alongside an anonymous survey of 35 supervisors and managers, a workshop with seven participants and three interviews. That is not a huge sample on the survey side, which is worth keeping in mind when you read the percentages, but the position description analysis is solid and it is the part I found most useful.
The position descriptions are the part that stuck with me, because they are written by the industry itself rather than by regulators or academics. They are mining companies describing the job as they see it.
Supervise and lead crews appears in 70% of them. Coach and mentor, 55%. Oversee daily operations, 54%. Promote safety culture, 50%. Statutory compliance, 45%. Safety leadership activities, 36%.
On the knowledge side, Queensland legislation knowledge appears in 32%, which is just under a third.
So roughly seven in ten position descriptions describe the job as leading a crew, and roughly one in three mentions knowing the legislation the job is now accountable under. We are still writing the role the way it was understood twenty years ago, while the Act now describes it as implementing and monitoring the safety and health management system.
That mismatch is not a training problem to start with. It is a job description problem. But it becomes a training problem the moment you try to work out what to train someone in.
The survey asked supervisors how their time splits across a routine and a non-routine day.
On-the-job risk and control checks came out at 21% of a routine day and 22% of a non-routine day. Team leadership was 19% and 25%. Office and desktop work was 26% and 17%.
UQ’s survey found that a fifth of the job is checking risk and controls on the ground. That is not a side task squeezed in around production. It is one of the largest single blocks of a supervisor’s day, and it is the part that the national training units were never really built to cover.
The slide carried a line from the Brady review alongside it, about fatalities involving inadequate supervision to identify and remedy shortfalls in training and controls. Putting that next to the time-allocation chart makes the point better than either does on its own.
A separate slide ranked supervisor skills by importance, scored out of ten. The top of it:
At the other end, administrative and digital competence scored 6.3.
I would note that this is a ranking of skills, not of the nine training needs that came later in the presentation. They are two different slides and it is easy to run them together. We did exactly that internally before going back to the source, which is a decent argument for always going back to the source.
What I take from the list is that two of the top three are about how a person behaves, and the third is about knowing your controls. None of that comes from a two-day competency cluster.
The review identified nine areas supervisors need training in:
On that last one, the review describes it as contributing to investigations of incidents and critical control failures. That is broader than investigating accidents. It means looking into a control that did not work even when nothing happened, which is a different discipline and a more useful one.
Number two is where the presentation made the point that landed hardest for me. Our legislation requires supervisors to consult, but our training packages teach how to communicate, not consult. Those are not the same skill. Communicating is telling people things clearly. Consulting is a two-way obligation with a legal test attached.
The review looked at whether existing national units cover this. Four were identified as covering the health and safety skills at least in part:
A fifth, RIIWHS301X (Conduct initial safety and health investigations), appeared on one slide in italics with question marks around it and unmarked on the next. The honest reading is four confirmed, with investigations flagged.
Then came the slide that matters, headed simply “HOWEVER”. The RII units do not cover the unique legislative requirements associated with supervision in Queensland, and consideration should be given to establishing a Queensland-specific unit of competency covering two things: supervisory statutory requirements as set out in legislation, and the supervisor’s role in effective critical control and principal hazard management.
That is two gaps, named in a review the Commissioner had asked for.
The obvious response is that the national units are being rewritten anyway, so wait for that.
UQ addressed it directly. The AUSMASA revision of the RII units is underway, but the presentation was clear that those units on their own will not equip supervisors for the work as it is described in Queensland legislation, and that the companion volume still has significant gaps.
The explanation given for why is the cleanest bit of reasoning in the whole session. Queensland is the only jurisdiction whose legislation actually lists critical controls. A national unit has to work in every state. So a national unit structurally cannot carry a requirement that only exists in one of them.
That is not a criticism of AUSMASA. It is just what happens when you try to write one thing for every state and territory.
The presentation closed on an open question. Significant feedback came back about experience requirements and leadership skills for the role, and whether those should be set by the committees or by companies. That question has not been answered. UQ said the report is finalised and now sits with the committees to consider. In the meantime it is being answered by default, by whatever each site decides to do.
Two other talks said the same thing from different directions.
Darren Nicholls, with more than 40 years in mining, formerly director of underground operations for a major Australian coal producer and a past chair of this conference, used his Day 2 keynote to describe a workforce short on experience, and said the shortage sits most sharply in supervisory roles. He gave a personal example. His own G3 risk competency took six to eight months to earn, where the equivalent today takes two to three days. Whatever you think about whether that is good or bad, it is a real change in what competent means, and it happened without much discussion.
Nunn and Harris presented the industry workshop synthesis on Day 4. Their conclusion was that while the supervisor role has fundamentally changed, “the training, the selection, and the support haven’t kept pace”. They also made the point that training only sticks when supervisors are supported afterwards, and that supervisor support is the strongest workplace predictor of whether training actually transfers to the job.
From RSHQ, there is one figure I have not stopped thinking about. Of the 61 operations RSHQ audited, 49% had no supervisor training on identifying, managing and reporting psychosocial hazards. Given psychosocial risk management is need number five on the list, that is a sizeable hole.
I will be upfront that I hold a first class ticket and I work with a training provider, so read the next bit accordingly.
We built our supervisor training before this review reported, rather than in response to it. It has been in delivery on Queensland underground coal operations, and it covers both of the gaps the review named, which are the Queensland statutory side and the supervisor’s role in critical control and principal hazard management.
I am not claiming it is the Queensland-specific unit of competency. That unit does not exist, and when it is written it will come out of the committees’ process rather than from us. S123 remains the recognised supervisor competency and our training sits around it, not in place of it. What we have mapped is content alignment against the review’s training needs analysis and the four RII units it confirmed, with investigations flagged as a likely fifth, and with formal alignment to those units in progress with a registered training organisation.
What I would say to anyone who was in that session and came out thinking they have a problem is that you probably do, and waiting for the unit is not a plan, because there are no published dates for it. Your duty to appoint competent supervisors applies now.
See how our supervisor training maps to the nine training needs