Topics
A rail worker can have decades of experience, hold the right qualifications and be doing highly specialised work on one network, only to be told they are not competent to do the same job on another.
For Phil Baker, a senior testing and commissioning engineer, that experience has been particularly frustrating.
“I’ve been a railway signal engineer for over 40 years,” Baker told the National Transport Commission’s Rail Skills Forum in Melbourne recently.
“I’m currently working on a project in New South Wales which is leading edge, next-generation signalling. I then go to Queensland to do the same testing, only to be told I’m not competent and that I need to be supervised by someone much more junior without the same experience. That brings a feeling of frustration, disappointment and really makes you question yourself.”
Baker’s experience highlights one of the long-standing challenges facing Australia’s rail industry: that workers’ skills are often not recognised outside the network they trained on.
The extra training and assessment required to get these skills more broadly accepted is not only frustrating, but also expensive, driving up costs for projects and operations and making it harder for the industry to move skilled people to where they are needed most.
“There will be some things you do need to do when you go to a different rail network, such as learning new routes or working arrangements, but the basic skill sets for rail are the same,” National Transport Commission Chair Carolyn Walsh said.
“These really need to be recognised across the country if we are going to improve efficiencies and productivity across our rail system.”
The NTC and Industry Skills Australia (ISA) have been working with industry to get national mutual recognition of workers’ skills and competencies. A five-step Blueprint for Mutual Recognition has been developed, alongside national guidance for the design, delivery and assessment of entry-level rail skills. The next challenge is establishing the governance and national standards needed to make mutual recognition work in practice. Possible options include industry codes or to changes to Rail Safety National Law.
More than 60 leaders from the rail and skills sectors came together at the National Transport Commission’s Rail Skills Forum to look at how this work could proceed and who should hold, maintain, audit and oversee a national rail mutual recognition scheme.
Discussions on the day revealed strong support for strengthening existing bodies Australian Rail Industry Standards Organisation (ARISO) and Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator to take on this work. It also explored whether a national scheme could be developed in stages with the rollout of European Train Control System providing a strong opportunity to establish nationally recognised training and competencies as the technology is being rolled out.
“Industry have told us they want this regulated, they don’t want a voluntary system,” ISA Director of Project Operations Klausch Schmidt said.
“They’re concerned about a lot of factors around quality and inconsistency of training between providers and organisations.”
At the heart of the issue is trust.
“Rail infrastructure managers need to be able to trust that people coming from other jurisdictions have the capability and competency they’re supposed to,” Jesse Crick, Test and Commissioning Manager – Rail Signalling at Sigtech Solutions said.
“It’s important that the underlying elements of competencies align, that it’s agreed by everybody, that the assessors are trusted, that the framework is trusted, and that the entire process end-to-end is really taken into consideration.”
Unions are also supportive of the scheme.
National Secretary of the Rail Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) Alex Claassens said standardisation around skillsets, training and assessment that raised the bar was critical to growing the future of the rail industry.
“It’s everyone’s responsibility to make our industry even stronger by removing the barriers for workers to build their skills. With everyone coming together and getting on the same page, we’re starting to see some hope on the horizon,” Claassens said.
“Workers need to be able to earn a good living, make sure they’re safe and have the confidence that the skills they’ve built up are portable. We also want the rail industry to be able to flourish and grow.”
Getting national mutual recognition of rail skills and training work is an important part of the National Rail Action Plan, bringing together governments and industry to improve productivity, safety and interoperability across Australia’s rail system.