Safety Issues for Outdoor Professionals: A Constructive Ergonomics Approach to Vocational Training
Résumé
Professionals in outdoor activities need to adapt to climate change and manage risks in a constantly changing working environment. Vocational training must therefore enable them to acquire a range of skills related to acting under greater uncertainty. Our premise is that the constructive ergonomics approach can be used to create training content that focuses on how to develop resources in work situations. This paper presents a training course on human factors, developed for mountain guides and mountain leaders. The content is designed around two main concepts, the adaptative view of safety and the service relationship. Assuming that short-, medium- and long-term safety is constructed through the interactions between the professional and the clients, the other professionals and the professional structures, a model is proposed to highlight and discuss these interactions in the guided activity. Thus, a three-step approach is taken to address safety management through the understanding of human functioning, a reflective analysis of professional practice and the elements allowed to construct its own resources. The fact that it was not possible to carry out a solid quantitative evaluation of the impacts of the training is a limitation of this proposal. However, the strength of this approach lies in the prior analysis of the work-as-done, the mobilization of recent theoretical concepts in safety management and the involvement of experienced professionals to share on safety know-how related to cognitive and social non-technical skills.