Abstract:

Construction personnel must be comprehensively trained to react accordingly to safety risk and hazards at any construction site. A strictly formal approach to safety education and training through lecture sessions and text-based instructions is not a best solution. Traditional occupational health and safety (OHS) trainings usually focus on cognitively acquired skills rather than sharing knowledge of actual workplace conditions. It may degrade OHS conditions of workers as much as it hampers informal development and transfer of tacit knowledge and may lead to an increase of risk behavior of workers.

The tacit knowledge is implicit and it plays an important role in development of individual workers awareness of risks in the workplace. It attracts to the experience and know-how of the person who possesses it. The most distinguished powers of tacit knowledge involve easy decision making, increasing quality of individual`s work and improved accuracy of performance in risky situations. Mostly, it is obtained through experience, observation and reflection, it resides in human minds and it creates a considerable proportion of the intellectual asset much essential towards the achievement of improved performance.

The paper points to the importance of developing tacit knowledge in OHS education and it deals with appropriate practical methods and tools to obtain tacit knowledge of OHS performance. The methods include mainly storytelling, thematic talks and conversations with professionals and practitioners from the sector and training systems that employ Virtual Reality (VR). Virtual reality effectively simulates different working and living conditions and successfully supports the learning process. VR applications strengthen human ability and motivation to absorb new knowledge and change inefficient workflows. The training simulators and game based training are becoming popular for OHS knowledge sharing in the sector.

The Faculty of Civil Engineering in Košice (Slovakia) prepares graduates to work in various positions in the construction sector and it provides bachelor study in four different study programs. One of these programs offers the course “Occupational Safety and Health in Construction”. The educational strategies and methods of the course are mixed, from such as lectures to adoption of some progressive tools, such as VR applications and a video game. The aim of the study presented in the paper is to evaluate the individual`s tacit knowledge of OHS in the group of students that completed the mentioned course. The situational judgement test was conducted to evaluate the tacit knowledge of ten selected students. An expert-based scoring strategy was applied to score the test. Five experts from different construction companies in Slovakia were asked to make judgements about the items in the respective test. The development and results of testing are presented in the submitted paper.

Keywords:

Safety education, safety training, tacit knowledge, knowledge evaluation, learning techniques.