The relentless challenge to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your data center workforce and minimize human-error-related risk often requires decision-making based on information that leaves leaders longing for black and white clarity. Andrew Stevens, CEO of CNet Training, an Uptime Education Company, explains why seeking polarized information could limit your opportunities for improvement and why the greatest gains are to be discovered in the complex, nuanced, shades of gray in between.
When you’re tasked with optimizing the efficiency and productivity of your mission critical workforce, every day-to-day decision counts. Reliable, real-time information needs to be readily available to empower data center managers to make confident, whole picture decisions. The desire for this information to be neat and clear-cut is common and understandable so that leaders can feel comfortable making assured, indisputable choices. But when it comes to your workforce, the strategic choices involved in deploying teams of people with appropriate levels of skill and knowledge are far more likely to be effective when they’re based on complex and multifaceted information.
Operating in a high-risk industry such as digital infrastructure, being sure that your people can and will do the right thing is mission critical, and being able to prove it is a regulatory requirement. It’s therefore vital to put in place a process that ensures every individual in your organization is competent and confident in their role. Far from being a box-ticking task of ensuring each person has attended the required training, guaranteeing your workforce is up to scratch is a far more involved and strategic process with plenty of gray areas to analyze and interpret.
Implementing an assessment system across every department within the mission critical facility is key to unlocking the vital data required to plan education that builds strong, competent, and confident teams. An assessment system that is built into your business processes will enable you to manage accurately, monitor, and measure the competence and confidence of your entire workforce. Such an assessment system will identify where your teams are missing vital knowledge and understanding to empower them to perform their jobs effectively and achieve full compliance.
The Competency and Confidence Assessment Modelling (CCAM®) system from CNet Training is built around a theory developed by management coach Martin M. Broadwell in the 1960s. If you aren’t familiar with Broadwell’s work, he developed “The Four Stages of Competence” as a learning model that describes the various psychological stages we go through when learning a new skill: unconscious competence (ignorance), conscious incompetence (awareness), conscious competence (learning), and unconscious competence (mastery). CCAM® testing uncovers not only whether individuals will do the right thing in any given scenario, but also how confident they are in their choice. This combination is crucial as confidence in their decision making is often definitive to success. The system will analyze each person’s knowledge and skill competence and confidence levels to identify opportunities for individual improvement through personalized recommendations, such as mentorship, pockets of specific learning or full education programs, or simply monitoring of certain areas.
