Analysis of the accident investigations indicated that the third or fourth reason for the accidents was communication concerns. The causes were, for example, “I wish I had said a word,” “I should have talked to you before I did something,” etc. To overcome these human factors regarding communication, the implementation of non-technical skill education is required. Bias often leads to misjudgments when receiving and understanding information. Setting the goal as “knowing yourself leads to decrease of accidents,” I developed a questionnaire method that measures the person’s degree of bias. By increasing awareness of bias, I thought that the number of accidents would decrease, so I constructed this new education program.

We calculated the occupational accident rate in Japan, that is, the number of victims per 1,000 workers in a year, as a function of age, in one-year age intervals from 2006–2010 statistics on occupational accidents and employees. We used individual accident data randomly sampled from the reports of occupational accidents requiring at least a four-day absence, including fatal accidents, collected by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. We determined the number of employees by age group from the results of the Labour Force Survey by the Statistics Bureau, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. We found that each age distribution classified by the type of accident, cause, and/or kind of industry has different characteristics. Further, the analysis in one-year intervals clearly revealed the age group at higher risk and drastic changes in the rate for small age differences of two to three years.