TSC Simulation is a lead partner, one of the 21 organisations from 9 countries that have been working together to develop a European Reference Model (ERM). The ERM will map the education and training of control room operators in the chemical and process industries throughout Europe. This ambitious project, funded at €750,000 under the EC Leonardo da Vinci Scheme, is aimed at promoting transnational employment and training. It is an important step in bringing down barriers to enable companies in the chemical industry throughout Europe to access qualified staff regardless of language barriers or country of origin.
The aim of the project is to develop a common framework for initial and ongoing training of a control room operator in the chemical and process industries. The target is to match this with existing national frameworks. For example, in the UK the proposed new framework exactly matches the NVQ level 3 standard, whilst in Germany it matches the German “Chemikant” qualification to within 99%.
Michael Bolton, Managing Director of Technical Simulation Consultants Limited said “The framework will become the first step towards wide acceptance of transferrable European training standards for all operators in chemical process plants. It is an opportunity for everyone involved in training and competence assessment to review and refine their training objectives. Our software will play an important part in making this happen.”
Our JaSim® software has undergone additional development to become an important tool to assist training providers in covering those aspects of the new ERM that include both background knowledge and practical operation of the process plant. JaSim® provides software to cover all aspects of the ERM that can be taught or measured using simulation.
An additional goal of the project is the building up of a network of organisations that are actively involved with the education and training of operators for chemical process plants. For details of partners, please follow this link to Leonardo Partners.
For more information, please visit the project website: http://www.ects-chemie.de/
