The Incompetence of Competency Assurance

The competence of people operating, maintaining and managing safety-related and safety-critical systems is a key factor in their safe operation. Assuring that appropriate, effective and robust processes for competence and performance assessment are in place has been an ongoing cause of concern for operators and regulators, alike. Traditional approaches are unable to capture and assess the impact of less overt human factors that influence an individual's day to day fitness for duty. We review what may be considered a fundamental problem in traditional approaches in so far as they fail to address wider issues most notably the assurance of effective safety leadership and specifically the competencies and capabilities of the leaders themselves.