Monitoring skill acquisition and decay plays an important part in ensuring competency for safety critical tasks. Many industries have imposed parameters. For example:

• Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR) require a verification of competency if a control room operator has not worked as a control room operator for three months
• Aviation industry requires pilots to verify competency if they have not flown a specific aircraft for 6 months, further Qantas reduces this to 45 days and requires time in the simulator or flying time with a training captain.

For any critical task a wide range of factors should be considered to determine how long and person can be considered competent and what triggers a removal of the authority to conduct this work. These include:

• Current competency level: E.g. mastery, competent (experienced), qualified (training completed).
• Frequency of work: E.g. how many daily, weekly, monthly.
• Cycle time between work: E.g. daily, weekly, monthly.
• Level of supervision / field verification to potentially extend time to removal of authority.

As an example, within the context of this review the following parameters / requirements could be considered to maintain authority for and critical task. Note these are examples and consultation with the workforce, trainers and risk owners is essential to achieve and workable yet optimal approach to maximise human performance:

• Shall have completed the task at least once in the last 7 days in the field or within a simulated environment if training only recently completed.
• Shall have completed the task at least once in the last 28 days in the field or within a simulated environment if considered mastery or competent.
• If conducted weekly 28 days increases to 84 days.
• If conducted daily and is a core part of the role increase to 12 months.
• Consider a process to extend these should informal field verification be accessible and reliable.
• Effort should be made to exposure recently trained individuals to the task daily for 3 months to progress to competent.
• Define parameters for mastery and competent.