A Better Learning Platform

For Ole Månsson it was a case of déjà vu, for Morten Kaiser, a totally new experience. The two were in a helicopter, being dropped onto a platform in the Danfeldt where they would spend the next two days – the same length of time they'd spent four months earlier preparing for the trip by jumping in and out of a near-freezing Esbjerg harbour.

The objective of the two MT instructors was a fact-finding and familiarization mission in order to develop a new series of courses for Maersk Oil. As they stepped down from the helicopter they knew that every minute of the trip was vital for they were up against the clock. The need for the course came out of training schemes in Scotland and Norway attended by platform managers who identified a gap in the safety set-up which they immediately wanted to fill.

Ole was totally familiar with the surroundings they had dropped into having spent ten years dropping onto platforms as a surveyor for the Government. On this occasion he'd brought the new training techniques gathered over the past three years and in Morten there was the perfect way of deeply probing the human aspect of working in such an environment.

The Control Room operators work 12 hours on, 12 off, two weeks on, three off. They actually run what is in effect an offshore oil refinery doing the initial separation of oil and gas from the water and returning the water, cleaned, underground. It is something that can be routine, but what Ole and Morten will introduce is the way to react when the unexpected happens.

The comparative urgency was generated by the fact that by late September Ole and Morten need to have the two-day pilot course packaged and practiced. In front of them there will be between six and eight members of a platform's crisis management staff. After the pilot, having made any necessary alterations, two more courses will follow before Christmas, and then seven before the summer break with a further five in the autumn – a busy schedule. The participants will be drawn from the five Maersk Oil centres in the Danish sector of the North Sea.

Preparing for the arrival of the first participants has meant 'flipping' the LNG simulator suite. 'The instructors' control room will become the testing ground for the students with the instructors moving into the simulator suite,' explains Ole. 'Were building a replica of the control board, complete with lights and will trigger different scenarios.'

It's from the inverted classroom that Ole and Morten will observe how the participants react using a one-way mirror. 'A large part of the course is not what to do, but how you react and inter-react with the rest of the team. Morten will constantly be pushing the scenarios into the discomfort zone,' Ole adds.

The courses will be over two days, with day one concentrating on theory and what defines crisis procedures and end with a table-top exercise. Day two is dominated by the main exercise.