I’d like you to imagine a young demolition or construction worker. They are green, and have no experience.
I’d like you to imagine that person as a large but empty glass bowl (and if anyone has seen the new Oppenheimer movie, you will know precisely where I stole this metaphor).
Every time that person attends a training course or a toolbox talk, a single marble of knowledge is added to that bowl. Every time one of their fellow workers imparts some fresh new wisdom adds another marble. More marbles are added for attending conferences and seminars. Even more are added each time that individual experiences and overcomes a new challenge; every time they operate a new machine; every time they adapt to a new site or sector.
After 15, 20 or 30 years, that once empty bowl is filled to the brim with marbles that prove that not only have they “been there and done that” but that they also have the t-shirt in every size and colour ever manufactured.
Each of those marbles represents invaluable knowledge, wisdom and experience gained over countless hours. They also represent a huge investment in time, effort and money that has taken an initially blank canvas and turned it into a rounded and trusted member of the team.
Then, after decades of investment, we pick up that bowl, pour out all its contents and start again as that person retires, before starting the whole process again with a new young candidate and another empty bowl.
What a terrible, terrible waste. All that accumulated knowledge, wisdom, time and money just discarded before having to start the entire process over again. That would be a crying shame in any industry sector. But in a field of endeavour in which waste minimisation is a cornerstone, such profligacy is almost criminal.
I am, of course, talking about mentorship; the notion of taking acquired knowledge from some of our industry veterans and passing it on to the next generation.
As an industry, we continue to invest millions in so-called training, purely to provide workers with a piece of plastic. That piece of plastic proves they passed a test but it is no measure of actual competence. It doesn’t make the cardholder a rounded and reliable human being. It doesn’t measure their work ethic, their punctuality or their ability to work as part of a team.
Yet all of that can be learned and absorbed by working alongside individuals with the requisite experience, expertise and knowledge.
It is highly unlikely that I will ever require a team of demolition workers. But if I did, I would prefer a team whose rough edges had been knocked off by an industry veteran than a team that was still wet behind the ears but that carried a credit card-sized piece of plastic with their photo on it.
Going back to my glass bowl analogy. It could take years or even decades to fill that empty vessel with the requisite number of marbles. Surely, rather than pouring away all the marbles each time someone retires or quits the industry, it would be better to pour at least some of those marbles into the next empty bowl?
