Thursday

Last day!

Today was a light day, and not just because it was 1/2 day. After a brief review of the week's activities, we discussed our different roles at our plants. There was a lot of talk about suggesting a standardized role. Most of the class claimed that they spent about 30% of their time on their core IT duties, and the rest on "administrivia" that they were assigned. There was some discussion that ITs need to get more involved in-plant, and about the difficulty of getting notified about TPE and JPM observation opportunities. Duane Arnold has an online tool on their training homepage in which a button sends a mass email to everyone involved in TPE observation that one is occurring in a certain time frame (usually a 10-15 minute window). One of the participants was a trainer in the chemical industry for most of his career, and said that we need to be benchmarking outside industry as well as each other--best nuclear practices may not be overall best practices. Someone else mentioned that hospitals are starting to use the navy nuclear training format, so that might be a good place to start.

We then looked at how the board supplement for the ASER is constructed and where that data is on the INPO website.

The next discussion was on the future of training. INPO has plans in 2009 to expand leadership development courses, improve NANTeL (especially bandwidth issues), and work on methods to bring new workers into the culture. They are also working on NANTeL new instructor training and coordinating with community and technical colleges. For 2010, budget permitting, their goals are to add fundamentals training for operators, maintenance, and technical personnel, and create a common content management system and entry level assessment for initial training waivers and exemptions.

Wednesday

A full day, and agreed by most to be the most productive. We started with Conducting Effective Observations. There wasn't much new here for me, though the idea did come up about doing some CT with supervisors and line managers on good observation skills. Another thing that the IT should probably do is talk about the class with students before going to talk with the instructor, post-obs.

The next session was on Coaching and Mentoring. Some interesting discussion about coaching skills, but what I wrote down was to get or view the Practical Coach video from Coastal Video and Gambler's Dillema from INPO. The powerpoints from this presentation and the one above are available at INPO, or I can email them to you.

The afternoon was taken up with Bill Thompson's presentation on 1.7. I can't do it justice here--or at all--but the gist is to be careful about 1.7 measurements and Bravo-basis CT items on attachment V. They need to be carefully labeled and chosen, and you don't need a whole lot of them because they are work-intensive. However, the caveat is not to completely avoid bravos on the aser because of the workload. Bill's presentation is available on INPO as well.

We then took a tour of the boardroom. You can smell the sweat.