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Help with Pre-screening
Not everyone can become a musician. Indeed, most of us lack the necessary musical ability and never even dream about a career in music. As everyone knows, someone who can't sing well can practice forever and never sing any better. About 4% of the general population can't even "hold a tune". Another kind of human difference relates to colour vision: about 1 man in 12 has problems (especially with red and green), but less than 1 woman in 200. It's nobody's fault. That's just the way we're born.
More and more people are coming to recognize that becoming a heavy equipment operator also requires human abilities which cannot be taught; just like musical ability, you either have them or you don't. Many people call this aptitude (sometimes "mechanical aptitude"). And studies show that in typical vocational training programs, up to 30% of trainees lack the pre-requisite abilities to become truly proficient operators of modern heavy equipment.
Industrial psychologists have identified the three kinds of natural abilities important for operating heavy equipment:
Other research indicates that learning new skills and creating muscle memory is a three part process. In stage 1, differences in learning correlate with differences in general intelligence. That's because the focus is on listening and thinking carefully about instruction, to get the "what to do" and "how to do it" right. Later, in stage 2, differences in learning are largely due to differences in perceptual/cognitive abilities. Here the focus is on learning to anticipate the consequences of your operator inputs to achieve the required results. Finally, in stage 3, differences in learning are dominated by differences in psycho-motor abilities, where gestures are made with increasing ease. This means that once training ends, how skilled you become depends upon your perceptual, cognitive, and psycho-motor abilities. And that's why evaluating human abilities is so essential for predicting eventual on-the-job performance of new operators!
But measuring differences in those natural abilities, is difficult to do in a reliable and meaningful way. To be sure, industrial psychologists have invented all kinds of tests with peg-boards and paper folding (to name just two examples) to help out, but these are just "surrogates" or "proxies" for the real deal because they are designed to reproduce, in highly simplified ways, what operating modern heavy equipment is all about. As a result, trainers have continued to rely on observing people at work at the controls of real machines, with all of the associated costs and potential danger. Now simulation technology from Simlog can help out! For example, what better way to double check that someone has what it takes to become a competent operator of mechanized forestry equipment than to spend time at Simlog's forestry machine simulator? Indeed, we have documented evidence that just half a day of simulator-based training is enough to reliably identify those training candidates who lack the necessary human abilities to become highly skilled operators at the controls.
With your Personal Simulator used to help evaluate operator potential, the average competency of your training class increases, leading to higher productivity and fewer equipment problems. In addition, on average, your training staff will have time to turn "average" trainees into "good" ones, instead of "wasting" time with the weakest trainees who are unable to develop the required proficiency. So use your training budget as wisely as you can, and to look to us for help with simulator-based pre-screening (and training). Questions? Just contact Simlog! |
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