Mental skill requirements

JHA is used to close the gaps that can develop between what is actually being done, as jobs are completed and requirements to implement a successful safety system. When conducting a JHA, an in-depth understanding of tasks-specific physical and mental skill requirements is developed, as the step-by-step and task-by-task analysis is done. 

Medical qualifications shall be consistent with the motor and mental skills required to perform the job tasks of the position. In addition, personnel who are certified/qualified/assigned to RBO, CCRO, and Supervisory positions shall meet medical requirements specified in ANSI/ANS 3.4, "Medical Certification and Monitoring of Personnel Requiring Operator Licences for Nuclear Power Plants" (Reference 4). 

In general, little use is made in the process industry of more sophisticated approaches such as job and task analysis (see Chapter 4) to define the mental and physical skills required for specific types of work, and to tailor the training program accordingly. Instead, informal on-the-job training is common, even in more complex types of work such as control room tasks. Although the necessary skills will eventually be acquired by this process, its inefficiency... 

The key recognitive skill required to carry out the above tasks is the formation of a mental model of the process operations that fits the current facts about the process and enables the operators to correctly assess process behavior and predict the effects of possible control actions. Correct mental models of process operations have allowed operators to overcome the weakness of lost sensors and conflicting trends, even under the pressure of an emergency (Dvorak, 1987), whereas most of the operational mishandlings are due to an erroneous perception as to what is going on in the process (O Shima, 1983). 

Children develop normally until 8-15 months of age, when they begin to lose previously acguired skills requiring coordination of physical and mental activities (developmental regression). 

Critical reading and thinking skills require active reading. Being an active reader means you have to engage with the text, both mentally and physically. 

As with aU job-evaluation methods, information about the jobs must be collected and job descriptions prepared. The Factor Comparison Method differs, however, in that it requires that jobs be analyzed and described in terms of the compensable factors used in the plan. The originators of the method, Benge et al. (1941), prescribed five factors mental requirements, skill requirements, physical factors, responsibihty, and working conditions. They considered these factors to be universal (applicable to aU jobs in aU organizations) but allowed some latitude in the specific definition of each factor among organizations. 

Once each benchmark job is ranked on each factor, the next step is to allocate the crrrrent wages paid for each benchmark job among the compensable factors. Essentially, this is done by deciding how much of the wage rate for each benchmark job is associated with mental demands, how much with physical requirements, and so on, across all the compensable factors. This is done for each benchmark job and is usually based on the judgment of a compensation committee. For extunple, in Table 2, of the 5.80 per hour paid to the punch press operator, the committee had decided that 0.80 of it is attributable to the job s mental requirements, another 0.80 is attributable to the job s experience/skill requirements, 2.40 is attributable to the job s physiceil requirements, 1.10 is attributable to the job s supervisory requirements, and 0.70 is attributable to the job s other responsibilities. The total 5.80 is thus allocated among the compensable factors. This process is repeated for each of the benchmark jobs. 

Information produced by the analysis of tasks, such as the mental and physical requirements of a task, manual operations involved, skills required. 

The IMAS technique described above is useful, in that it addresses aspects of operational skills, that is, diagnostic and problem solving abilities, that are not covered by other techniques. To that extent it can be regarded as a method of cognitive task analysis. It is not essential to use a computer program to obtain useful results. The mental models produced by IMAS can be elicited by pencil and paper methods. Nevertheless interpretation and application of the results require some expertise. 

Operation— the mental and physical skills and information requirements... 

The correct interpretation of measured process data is essential for the satisfactory execution of many computer-aided, intelligent decision support systems that modern processing plants require. In supervisory control, detection and diagnosis of faults, adaptive control, product quality control, and recovery from large operational deviations, determining the mapping from process trends to operational conditions is the pivotal task. Plant operators skilled in the extraction of real-time patterns of process data and the identification of distinguishing features in process trends, can form a mental model on the operational status and its anticipated evolution in time. 

Avoid performing tasks that require mental alertness or motor skills until response... 

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