ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Organ. Psychol.
Sec. Performance and Development
This article is part of the Research TopicFostering Learning in Dynamic Work Environments: Towards Integrative Approaches for Work-Related LearningView all 5 articles
What should I do now? Evaluation of two refresher trainings in the chemical industry to maintain (non)technical skills
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
- 2Bundesinstitut fur Berufsbildung, Bonn, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Against the background of Industry 4.0, High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) are increasingly shaped by automation and procedural standardization, reducing opportunities to apply critical skills in practice. In non-routine situations, such as system failures, this may result in delayed responses and increased safety risks. While refresher trainings are well established in aviation and maritime domains, no comparable standard exists in the chemical industry. This article reports on two experimental field studies evaluating short-format refresher trainings for technical and non-technical competencies. In the first study (N = 24), a virtual reality (VR) simulation was used to refresh emergency-related technical skills of trainee chemical technicians. Performance and error rates and knowledge retention were assessed at three time points. In the second study (N = 45), a gamified, on-the-job intervention (non-VR) was developed to reinforce team resource management (TRM) skills across three sessions. Pre-post assessments focused on the use of TRM competencies and awareness of TRM. Both interventions were positively evaluated and showed potential to counteract skill decay under real-world conditions. The VR training led to fewer errors, improved performance in emergency scenarios, and faster response times. These findings support the integration of targeted refresher formats into operational training strategies to sustain competence in safety-critical environments.
Keywords: Refresher training, skill-decay, Operator Skills, Team resource management, High reliabilityorganizations, virtual reality, Chemical Industry, pharmaceutical industry
Received: 21 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Vogel, Conein, Gabriel and Kluge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Olga Vogel, olga.vogel@rub.de
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.