Asiana flight 214 crash and the problem of workplace training

On 6th July 2013, Asiana airlines Boeing 777 flight 214 from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco in the US crashed during a landing attempt at San Francisco international airport. Most of the 307 people aboard were able to evacuate safely, 182 were injured, and two Chinese students and another unnamed minor died. As the US National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation into the accident, the Board chairman has said preliminary work shows the aircraft was ‘too low, and too slow’ during its approach.

It has also been noted that the flying pilot Lee Gang-kuk, with about 10,000 hours of commercial pilot experience, had only about 35 hours operating the Boeing 777 and was flying the big jet into San Francisco for the first time.  The instructor pilot, Lee Jeong-min, an experienced pilot who has landed a this same aircraft at San Francisco airport 33 times was in the Boeing 777 trainer role for the first time. It is not clear what qualified Jeong-min as an instructor other than many years of experience.

Although I do not intend to speculate as to the cause of the crash, I would like to isolate the issue of workplace training and what organizations might learn. I will argue that length of work experience as basis for selection as an trainer/instructor is erroneous because knowing how to perform and teaching others to perform are different skills. The many years of experience that enable one acquire and master job skills do not naturally translate into ability to instruct novices.

To teach another individual how to perform in real life requires giving them a performance challenge. 

In the case of an aircraft pilot, this would be spending hours flying until a particular qualification threshold. I will use an example that many a reader will be more familiar with, driving a car. Knowing how to maintain control of a car on the road, monitoring speed and paying attention to road signs and other road users are crucial skills for all drivers. Knowing how to maintain speed in one’s car, for instance, is a different matter from teaching another individual to do the same. 
A good driving instructor knows how to maintain required speed and how to see others through performing the same task. They know crucial points when not to let one make mistakes with speed that can be fatal or at least criminal. They will watch out for what a novice driver may not see, like people who may suddenly choose to cross the road.

The same can be said of a good school teacher. A biologist, holder of a PhD, considering high school teaching may be asked to join a secondary school teacher preparation programme.  Those who would consider this uncalled for soon realize teaching is not just about content, it brings other matters to bear. The good teacher is called not only to try to engage the student to the point that they take responsibility for their own learning, but also pay attention to realize when the student is astray. The teacher is often called to admonish the student in a stern voice, but will also be found offering a sympathetic ear as a parent would do with their own child. 

In fact very experienced workers may be worse than less experienced colleagues because sometimes the former bring experience that is mis-educative to the job of training. Mis-educative work experience has the effect of arresting growth of further experience. For instance, one may propose the work methods they used through the many years of work as the only successful ones in spite of knowledge advancement.

A counter-argument may be advanced that experienced workers learn to train by training. This is only true to the extent that organizations acknowledge that training is not a role that one simply switches to given many years of job performance. Training others requires understanding how individuals learn, what may impede learning, what can go wrong (especially when errors may result in loss of life) and the circumstances under which the student should have lee-way to take risks and experiment.

The false assumption that experienced workers can seamlessly become trainers leads many organizations to expecting too much of experienced staff who do not know how to perform in a teaching role.  In a follow-up post, I will take up the issue of how employees in a bureaucratic work environment think and react in the face of emergencies.

*The author is a mechanic engineer with several years of experience in education.