Senior industry professionals have raised concerns about the limited expertise of new people to the industry, particularly when it comes to a holistic appreciation of the decisions that need to be made. These concerns, in part, stem from an acknowledgement that the very strong public safety record of the Australian pipeline industry is due to the safety values and expertise of its professional staff as much as anything else. These issues raise key questions, including: how do young engineers joining the pipeline industry understand safety and their role in its maintenance? How is that safety knowledge being built? And more generally, how is professional expertise most effectively built in the contemporary pipeline industry context?
These are questions that drove recent research through the Australian National University as part of the Energy Pipelines Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) research program. Over 30 pipeline industry professionals were interviewed, including “˜young’ engineers, their managers, and technical experts. The focus of this research was understandings of safety, learning methods that were proving effective, and the actions of companies and industry that affected these outcomes. The purpose of this research was to give a preliminary assessment of how generational change is impacting on safety practices, as well as taking a step towards identifying effective methods for building dispositions towards safety and the necessary expertise to ensure it.
Learnings from safety research
An initial finding of this research was that the young engineers interviewed had a strong value of safety. However, there was significant variation in how safety was defined. For many engineers, safety was primarily defined in terms of personal safety (the so-called slips and trips), not prevention of major accidents. Given this emphasis, when some participants were asked about their understanding of safety in a pipeline context, and their roles and responsibilities in maintaining it, requirements like safety boots, high-visibility gear and safe working conditions were given. Some participants also demonstrated an understanding of safety as including the goal of preventing major accidents, an awareness that was demonstrated through linking their professional decisions, say in a design office, to major accidents they had heard of such as the 1998 Esso Longford gas explosion and the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion.
So why was there this variation? Understandings of safety tended to be influenced by the workplaces and roles of young engineers. Young engineers who worked in pipeline construction, maintenance, and operation, even when their work was primarily in an office context, were most concerned with the “˜personal’ safety to their staff and, in some cases, the personal safety of members of the public. This is in keeping with the most direct challenges that they were confronted with on a daily basis. Young design engineers, by contrast, were more focused on preventing major accidents. This understanding of safety and their role in it was primarily fostered in the workplace through the stories and values of colleagues and mentors. A minority had been involved in near-misses, such as an excavator making contact with a live pipe. Such experiences were reported as powerful lessons about how quickly things could go wrong, and fundamentally changed their decision making processes.
A common theme about learning here is the central role of experience and mentoring. When we think about knowledge and professional work, the wealth of theory associated with a discipline and the significant formal education required can most readily come to mind. In engineering, these formalised and theoretical elements are vital, and programs such as the Pipeline Engineer Training Program are working towards enhancing learning opportunities in this area. Experience-based “˜practical’ and “˜tacit’ knowledges are also highly valuable in a pipeline engineering context. They work to inform accurate and safe decisions in a way that formalised and theoretical knowledges cannot. This broader appreciation of knowledge is well-supported by the social science literature on learning and expertise, and was supported by the dominant knowledge sources reported by engineers interviewed as part of this research. Ultimately, engineering expertise and prevention of major accidents in the pipeline industry requires that a diversity of knowledge types and knowledge sources are actively fostered.
The role of companies
This broader appreciation of the sources of knowledge requires consideration of how learning can be most effectively supported. A factor that was found to significantly influence learning outcomes was the organisational context. Engineers were employed in diverse organisational contexts that dedicated varying resources to building knowledge in the workplace, and put varying emphasis on safety outcomes.
In some interviews, pressures that were identified to potentially make safety a second or third priority were schedule and cost. While such pressures (or their absence) could work to shape how young engineers understood safety and their role in it, in the same way, time and money also influenced learning both in terms of safety knowledge and expertise more generally.
Resources, and particularly time, were a primary factor that facilitated or inhibited development of safety knowledge and expertise in the sense that they are a necessary ingredient for experience and informal mentoring, and could compromise safe decisions. In one company context, there were significant resources dedicated to safety outcomes and staff development. A striking feature of their approach was the “˜open door’ policy that they actively engendered among staff. One engineer said that as a member of this company it was important to be “˜clearly available’ so particularly young engineers felt comfortable asking questions. Equally, staff called on to answer questions saw this as a part of their role, and a legitimate use of time. Unfortunately, this was not the case in all companies. Resource pressures could lead to resistance to dedicating time and money to extended mentoring arrangements, with the potential for a rapid loss of expertise in companies.
In addition to resources, structural factors in a company – particularly the physical proximity of young engineers to their mentors – had a significant influence on knowledge sharing and safety practices. In some cases, engineers were grouped by discipline. In others, they were grouped by work function. In practice, these structural factors influenced the knowledge and experiences that were available to young engineers. For engineers grouped by discipline, this typically meant that there was a wealth of discipline-specific knowledge that they could draw from their mentors. In cases where young engineers’ immediate neighbours were not engineers, or were engineers from another discipline, this work structure could inhibit the exchange of relevant engineering knowledge. This issue of proximity to relevant expertise also extended to office and off-site work arrangements, which could either support a free flow of information, or inhibit it.
An organisation’s response to safety incidents was also a major knowledge source in terms of how young engineers understood their company’s value of safety, how supported they felt to make challenging professional judgements, and how much they could learn from incidents. Particularly for young engineers, managing conflict over safety actions – whether on site or in an office context – was often a concern and a personal stressor. Some young engineers felt their safety values were congruent with their organisations’ safety actions, felt supported, and reported opportunities for building safety knowledge through incidences and near misses. For others, there were cases where they had observed what they perceived to be a disconnect between safety values and practices. In these cases, young engineers tended to feel they could not always make decisions that they believed where best for safety, and their learnings about safe practices were not being maximised. Young engineers interviewed hoped that their decisions to-date would not cause accidents, but this difficult situation was considered cause for concern.
The role of industry
While companies had a very strong influence on understandings of safety and learning opportunities, industry-wide networks and standards also played a role. The APIA and the Young Pipeliners Forum offers opportunities for building mentoring relationships and getting other opportunities for building knowledge such as research involvement, conference attendance, and site visits. The size of the industry was one of the reasons that mentoring at this scale was thought to be effective. There was a general sentiment that the industry had a unique “˜camaraderie’ and willingness to share.
Standards, and in particular AS 2885, were another way that knowledge and safety outcomes were managed at an industry level. All young engineers interviewed used AS 2885 to some degree. Most had attended some formal training on this standard. However, it was still thought that for those with less experience, use of the standard was dependent on the guidance of experts. In other words, standards provide a very useful guide, and collate the most up-to-date knowledge, but safe decisions still require expertise.
What next?
As a first stage of research, this project has aimed to identify themes that deserve further attention in the interests of addressing the potential knowledge loss that could imminently take place, and the long-term maintenance of safety. It raises questions that individual engineers and companies can ask that will hopefully facilitate productive discussions about what is happening in pipeline companies and industry to ensure safety knowledge and professional expertise is being fostered.
There is still much that we can learn about building safety knowledge and professional expertise in the pipeline industry.
The Energy Pipelines CRC will be looking to conduct further research in partnership with industry and APIA to examine more in-depth questions about professionalism and expertise that arose out of this work, such as social factors that impact on engineers’ capacity to make safe decisions, and strategies to support experience and mentoring in the pipeline industry context.
This work was funded by the Energy Pipelines CRC, supported through the Federal Government’s CRC’s Program. The cash and in-kind support from the APIA Research and Standards Committee is gratefully acknowledged.
Thank you to the research participants who gave up their time for interviews and made many thoughtful comments about their professional lives and activities.
Questions to consider in your workplace
Is safety understood to include the prevention of major accidents?
How are young engineers being supported in their daily activities? Are opportunities for experience made available? Are they contributing to work they are responsible for? Have they visited site? On site, do they have the support of a more experienced engineer? Are the potentially serious consequences of getting things wrong well understood by young engineers and are these consequences specifically linked to their day-to-day responsibilities?
Are there senior engineers with the time available for young engineers to ask questions? Are these engineers approachable? Are they in the same discipline? Do young engineers also have access to expertise in other disciplines as needed?
Are incidents responded to in an open way? Have staff been pressured to make decisions due to schedule and cost considerations? Do staff feel confident to make decisions for safety reasons?
Is information about incidents openly disseminated at an industry level?
Are there steps that industry can take to encourage informal mentoring?
Are there steps that industry can take to facilitate experience across companies?
