Design and Implementation of a Practical Training of Social Skills of Inspectors

Detailed description of project Back

In Hungary, administrative competence for occupational health and safety is assigned to two different ministries with one subordinate executive agency each: the Ministry of Employment and Labour supervises the National Labour Inspectorate, and the Ministry of Health, Social and Family Affairs supervises the National Public Health and Medical Officers’ Service. In addition, the National Mining Office and its regional headquarters are responsible for inspection activities related to extraction of mineral raw materials under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy and Transport.

In the last stage of pre-accession preparation, it is fully recognised by the inspection authorities that social skills – i.e.: communication, conflict resolution, negotiation skills – are as important as professional knowledge, notions of laws, knowledge of a foreign language and general proficiency in IT usage. This specific need is also dictated by the radical change in the number, size and main characteristics of work organisations, their complexity and often multi-national ownership, the requirement to build up partnership relations.

In this context, social skills are perceived as increasingly important to create a new balance between authoritative control functions as well as a new partnership with the employers and employees and/or with the growing number of co-operating stake-holders in the labour world.

Therefore, the three concerned authorities jointly wish to have their inspectors participate to tailor-made trainings. The trainings on social skills are also expected to contribute to tighten professional relations and to further harmonise inspection methodologies between the inspectors of the three authorities.

In pursuit of these objectives, a twinning programme on “Human Resource Development in Occupational Safety and Health” was approved by the EC, under the co-ordination of Ministry of Employment and Labour (MoEL) formerly Ministry of Social and Family Affairs.

In this framework, the specific objective of the present project is to foster human resource development at safety inspection authorities, in order to improve the effectiveness of local inspections – National Labour Inspectorate (NLI), National Public Health and Medical Officers’ Service (NPHMOS) and National Mining Office (NMO) – in line with the responsibilities falling under the framework directives on health and safety at work.

The training activity forms an integral part of the program aimed at the comprehensive development of the National Labour Inspectorate, National Public Health and Medical Officers’ Service and National Mining Office.

Type of services provided

The main objective of the project is to provide a practical training for 681 inspectors of three national agencies: the National Labour Inspectorate, the National Public Health and Medical Officers’ Service and the National Mining Office.

PROMAN HQ is responsible for the backstopping of the mission and for the quality control of all reports. The professional implementation of training is carried out by appointed trainers.

Special attention is paid to strengthening the life long learning competences of the recruited inspectors in order to ensure the proper management and dissemination of the acquired skills and competences of the training program. To this regard, recommendations on Sustainability will be proposed in the Final Report.

To achieve the objective, the following services are to be provided:

• Assistance in development of training curriculum for social skills and of training materials;
• Transfer ofknow-how for the training;
• Production of training materials;
• Logistic/organisation of the training;
• Implementation of the practical training.

PROMAN provided the following experts: an International Senior Expert for Social Skills Training, a Local Team Leader, 10 Local Trainers and a Local Educational Administrator.