How to Improve the Training of Staff in Mission Critical Systems

Due to the critical role of humans in mission critical systems, good training of these humans is of vital importance.

Among others, the following learning methods are very effective for that:

• Learning by Doing + Feedback
• Learning by Watching Masters at Work

I think you'll agree that these are very effective learning methods that should be part of any training.

Below we show how recording human computer interaction can help with these methods

Learning by Doing + Feedback

Learning by doing is either done with a simulator, or on the real system for advanced trainees.

The value of learning by doing increases when appropriate feedback can be provided by a trainer.

This has several challenges:

• Often, it is difficult to provide the feedback after the fact in way, so that the trainee really gets the point.
• The trainer may not be able to watch the trainee life all the time, so he/she may overlook situations which require feedback.

Here's where recording human computer interaction can help: A proper HCI-recorder can record all human-computer-interaction 24x7. This can be used with simulators or in the real system. That is, you'll have a full recording of everything that happened on the screens, and of all mouse and keyboard input.

With such recordings, the above-mentioned challenges can be met, e.g., as follows:

• The feedback can be explained while playing back the relevant parts of the recording and showing exactly the releveant actions, so the trainee sees exactly what happened and what he or she did.

  Slow-motion playback and pausing playback may be especially helpful with this.

  Also, single-click backward jumps in time will be useful for replaying the same situation again and again while explaining the critical stuff.

• The trainer can watch the actions of the trainees after the fact. For that he/she may select specific points in time, e.g., based on logs or knowlegde about the timing of specific events.

  Or the trainer may quickly skim through the recordings in fast motion, in order to find critical actions of trainees.

Learning by Watching Masters at Work

Trainees can learn a lot by watching masters at work. Especially important is to learn how masters handle critical situations well.

Of course it will be difficult to have trainees watch the masters a the exact point in time when a critical situation happens. At least I hope that critical situations happen rarely enough in your system so that watching operation at random points in time will typically not show a critical situation.

That's were recording all human-computer-interaction comes into play:

When you have recordings of all of your system operation, you will be able to cherry-pick those critical situations that were handeled exceptionally well and that are a good example for training purposes.

You can then show these examples to the trainees. Of course, slow motion, pausing and single-click jump-in-time will be useful for that, too.

Conclusion

A proper human-computer-interaction recorder that's suited for 24x7 recording of mission critical systems can be used to improve the training of staff in mission critical systems.

You can, e.g., use our field-proven software HCI-recorder DisplayRecorder for that.