At the most basic level, learning management systems (LMS) were designed with mandates in mind, not people. The first people in an organization to actually be exposed to this new technology were the compliance team; their creed and motto was wherever you can count it, you must count it. Sexual harassment is a clear example of this school of thought because companies can be sued if people haven’t been adequately trained, and if they have been trained, they can produce a piece of paper with their signature on it. Now apply that same philosophy to every other skill set in a warehouse, factory, or rail yard. The logic is airtight and inescapable.
Connectivity is where it starts
Generalist LMS software tends to make an assumption that access to an internet connection is ubiquitous, which it isn’t in mining. Corporate training software tends to involve a lot of streaming and real time progress updates, which is fine if you’re streaming video to a desktop or mobile device, but is a problem if an operator is learning a module in a break room with spotty LTE, spends twelve hours on the road with no reception, and expects the software to pick up precisely where they left off. Mine sites tend to rely on a combination of satellite and cellular backhaul links, and the connection is best described as intermittently adequate. Even organizations with decent connectivity balk at the thought of a training or productivity platform piggybacking on an otherwise reliable link, and when a generic LMS drops the connection in the middle of a learning module, users are left with a frozen image on their screens or a permissions lockout requiring a call to the helpdesk. None of these problems are inconsequential; the former can lead to a miner being unable to complete their reorientation and therefore unable to work that shift.
Compliance tracking is the second front
Once you start having connectivity issues, the bigger problem becomes the lack of a paper trail. MSHA Part 48 is no friend to training departments; new underground miners need 24 hours of training, new surface miners need 24 hours of training, and everyone needs 8 hours of annual refresher training. And every one of those hours needs to be recorded in a standardized way and be available to a compliance officer at a moment’s notice, including things like the date, duration, and version of the course, plus any proof that the worker actually engaged with the material as required.
Catch-all LMS platforms see all of these as variations on a theme of “course finished” and “course in progress”. As soon as the auditor asks to see supporting documentation, the trainer has to manually cross reference a spreadsheet of new miner training with another spreadsheet of refresher training with yet another spreadsheet of task training with some LMS exports, and that’s not even taking into account new miner progress freezes that occurred due to the same connectivity issues. That’s not an inefficiency, it’s a vulnerability in the regulatory and safety protocol of the organization that could lead to a work stoppage or citations.
The audit trail is often just as important as the training itself. A record that shows that the user “finished” a particular course on 3/1/2021 is no good if it doesn’t show that it was the supervisory user that marked the course as complete, that it was a required refresher course, that it applied to a particular task, and that the course was completed after a particular policy change took place, adding three slides about something that didn’t exist before to the beginning of the course. The protection isn’t there, and it shouldn’t be expected because a generalist system inherently enables it to be gamed.
Adoption fails when the software forgets who’s using it
Even if somehow the technology falls into place, the third front comes in the form of the users themselves, because generalist LMS platforms rarely take into account that the people who will be using the system weren’t hired to do office work and sit at a desk. They were hired based on their ability to work long shifts in twenty-four hour rotations, and share a kiosk or ruggedized tablet with three or more coworkers. And they were hired with at least some level of fluency interacting with the technology in a way that makes sense to them, often while working in environments where they wear gloves most of the time.
Workers who are put into software designed around the normal expectations of an office worker aren’t likely to finish a generic text and click based training module. They’ll try to breeze through it as quickly as possible so they can get the completion checkmark and go back to work, which is the opposite of what the training is intended for. Add inflexible localization onto that mix (keep in mind that many extractives industry sites host a number of immigrant workers who may not be fluent in the official language of the country) and you turn a training requirement into a language barrier. Workers who have spent their career dealing with limited connectivity and using a small set of tools for everything they do, from learning to work to entertainment, will have even greater issues when asked to use a software system that was designed around enterprise level drop downs and menus. Training completion rates become another weak link in the chain of safety, and a more mobile centric approach to training becomes a necessity.
Integration gaps turn training into manual admin work
If you’ve made it this far down the list, there’s probably something else the LMS vendors failed to consider that the training teams pointed out, and it probably had to do with the fact that there’s already software the mine uses to support its operations. Mines host some of the largest enterprise class ERPs today, or utilize a number of very niche fatigue management or equipment maintenance platforms. A good generalist LMS should be able to integrate with all of them, or the mine is likely wasting considerable time and resources on manual data entry in order to keep the information in both systems consistent, which we’ve already established is not ideal.
When a LMS is separate from other enterprise platforms, it creates disconnects; the most obvious ones are the safety disconnects. If a worker is listed as trained in the LMS but not in the production planning system, or the other way around, that’s a potential safety hazard for the whole operation. Training records can’t be trusted to flow seamlessly between the systems in a safe and efficient manner, and the same problems occur when the systems are forced to run independently.
Content that doesn’t match the site is next
Around this point, the training content library is also going to come under a magnifying glass, and it’s also going to fail the test. Generic LMS platforms will host a number of standard generic courses, which is fine for an office setting. Completely inadequate for ultra high risk mining operations.
Site specific scenarios need site specific content, and that content needs to be flexible and easy to maintain in order to make changes when new equipment is acquired or procedures revised. A library that has exactly the same courses for one mining site as it does for another misses the point entirely. Every day, two mining sites that are similar in almost every way except for the type of mining operations take on a number of dissimilar activities with completely different risk profiles. That’s a limitation SCORM has with offline progress tracking of any SCORM course, which is exacerbated by a generalist connectivity problem from the start. xAPI tracks more information about location, context, and people involved in training, which codifies more of the needed information about the training event, with an emphasis on long term competency rather than the documentation of a single instance of training that satisfies a regulatory requirement.
In practice, all of this boils down to the fact that the best mining LMS platforms are the ones that were designed for a poor connection and treated MSHA compliance as a requirement, not the ones that added compliance and PDF readiness as a customization layer on top of a generally applicable system. It sounds simple, but the difference it makes when explaining to a regulator why records aren’t missing is immeasurable.
Assessment rigor collapses under multiple-choice quizzes
Safety critical roles in mining require more than somebody simply passing a quiz. Supervisors should be signing off on demonstrated competency whenever possible, and an ideal world would have a skills matrix based competency management system where “verified competent in this role, observed by this supervisor on this date” is the most important information from the training department, and the LMS portion is simply recording what actions were taken when the competency evaluations commenced. A multi-choice test doesn’t demonstrate competency at anything beyond test taking, and it’s especially unwise to use that methodology for activities that are considered to carry a high risk of injury if performed incorrectly.
Multi-site operations expose everything at once
Multi site organizations tend to come up against many of the same issues, but on a much larger scale. Coordinating the shared use of equipment can become an exercise all on its own when there are different procedures and training requirements for operators at different sites. One of the sites may have exceptional training completion rates, but the disaster recovery training matrix is being maintained in an excel spreadsheet at the corporate office because it was more convenient than convincing the LMS admin to configure fifty variations of the same recurring course.
What holds up
None of this means that training software isn’t a viable option for heavy industry; it’s just that the requirements are dissimilar enough from those of an office worker that no matter how many “heavy industry” tick boxes you put on a generalist system, it’s always going to have issues. Connectivity issues serve to exacerbate these weaknesses acutely, placing the purchase decision under a magnifying glass and putting the functionality and objectives of the training system at risk of being compromised. If the content isn’t loaded, if the users can’t access it, if managers can’t update it, and if information can’t flow freely between the workers and course content – which are all problems stemming from a connectivity issue – the house is built upon sand.