If your safety metrics look fine, your compliance boxes are all ticked, and your teams are still showing up—are you confident your workforce is truly job-ready?
According to Richard White, Head of Learning at Valterra Platinum, the answer is often a quiet but resounding "no." In a recent webinar hosted by Realizeit's Liam O'Meara, White revealed the unsettling truth behind what he calls “the drift towards failure”—a slow, almost imperceptible degradation in field competency that many leaders won’t see coming until it’s too late.
“Training is still too often a formality,” White said. “It’s compliance-driven, check-the-box stuff. But in high-risk industries like mining, that’s not enough. Competency must be demonstrated—especially in the field.”
Supervisors: The Hidden Leverage Point
Supervisors, White argued, are the keystone of field performance. “If your supervisors are ineffective, everything under them suffers,” he said. These frontline leaders set the tone, the culture, and the standard. Yet they’re often promoted from within without sufficient support, and many still rely on outdated paper-based assessments. The result? Blind spots and inconsistent performance validation.
How to Respond: To avoid this drift, White and O'Meara outlined five specific actions organizations can take:
- Empower Supervisors – Equip them with simple, mobile-first digital tools designed for rugged environments. These tools must support coaching, validation, and data capture in the flow of work, turning supervisors into active agents of competency assurance.
- Digitize Competency Tracking – Replace fragmented, paper-based logs with real-time dashboards. This unlocks earlier insights, supports proactive interventions, and enables a consistent standard across all worksites.
- Leverage AI to Personalize Training – Use AI to evaluate existing knowledge, identify gaps, and deliver adaptive, personalized learning pathways. This reduces downtime and ensures every minute spent learning contributes to operational readiness.
- Embed Learning into Daily Work – Move away from isolated, center-based training. Deliver microlearning and just-in-time resources directly to workers as part of their operational routine.
- Start Small, Scale with Purpose – Don’t wait for a “perfect” transformation. Begin with one role, one competency, or one site. Show results. Build momentum.
Legacy Systems = Legacy Risk
Despite the technological leaps of the past decade, many organizations still rely on training systems that are outdated, rigid, and disconnected from real-time operations. “We’re capturing data—but often too late,” White said. “By the time we realize someone wasn’t ready, the incident has already happened.”
This is where Realizeit’s adaptive, AI-powered training model steps in. Rather than delivering the same training to everyone, it personalizes content based on what each worker already knows and what they still need. It enables supervisors to track readiness, verify performance in the flow of work, and guide learning with real-time feedback.
Why Starting Small Is the Smart Move
White’s advice to other organizations is clear: start small. “Don’t wait for the perfect system. Start with one process or one role and build from there. Learning transformation doesn’t happen overnight—but the risks of inaction are immediate.”
Ultimately, the goal isn’t just training. It’s competency assurance, embedded in operations, and visible across every role. In White’s words: “When learning becomes part of your PPE—something you carry with you every day—you know you’re on the right path.”
