Development and Evaluation of Experimental Environment for Assessing Effectiveness of Communication Skills

Abstract

For preventing accidents resulted from human errors in large-scale complex systems, operator personnel is required to learn not only Technical Skills (TS) but also Non-Technical Skills (NTS). However, it may be difficult for many industrial domains to develop and introduce comprehensive NTS training like Crew Resource Management (CRM) training in the aviation domain due to resource limitation. Therefore, simplified and generalized training methods of NTS are necessary for the purpose of bringing the safety benefits of NTS to wider industrial domains. For the first step to realize such NTS training, this study developed an experiment environment for examining the effectiveness of NTS skills derived from a specific industrial domain in generalized task context, focusing on communication skills which are regarded as fundamental skills of NTS. The experiment environment was evaluated through the effectiveness assessment of communication skills derived from the aviation domain. The experimental environment can contribute to the development of effective generalized NTS training program by supporting the identification of fundamental common communication skills.