Sifa-Portfolio – a Continuing Education Concept for Specialists on Industrial Safety Combining Formal and Informal Learning

Purpose – Specialists on industrial safety (Sifas) are appointed by companies due to German occupational safety act (ASiG) as safety advisors, to analyse the work environments and the work procedures. Their principal task is to inspect workplaces for adherence to regulations on health, safety and environment, and design actions to prevent from disease or injury of workers and environmental damages. Due to variety of settings in which work safety specialists are involved, they are obliged to continuous further education and permanent adoption to changing circumstances of occupational context. To do so, Sifa’s need access to tools which provide the following three key features: - possibility to share knowledge with experienced specialists on industrial safety (Sifa-Community), - ability to promptly recognize critical topics in the field of their activities (Trend- Monitoring), - opportunity to create track of records of further education on current topics, including the validation and certification of work-related informal learning (Sifa-Portfolio). Sifa-Portfolio and Trend-Monitoring are based on Sifa-Community, an exchange platform (www.sifa-community.de) with currently 5.000 members established in the context of a longitudinal study on Sifas. This paper will focuses on the concept of Sifa-Portfolio that was developed as a prototype of further education application based on the concept of EPortfolios. It allows Sifa’s to share their knowledge, recognize critical topics and create track of records of their informal further education to showcase their competencies and eventually receive certification. Design/methodology/approach – In the paper authors present the approach of Sifa- Portfolio - an application for further education, based on Sifa long-term study (Sifa- Langzeitstudie), data mining (text mining), and user centred design. It starts with the description of results of an online study and specific requirements that have to be considered when designing applications for specialists on industrial safety. It then presents the trend monitor based on Sifa-Community posts, which provides up to date information about most important topics that are being discussed within the community. It finally introduces Sifa-Portfolio, a high fidelity prototype of an expansion module for Sifa-Community. Originality/value – Until now, there are no dedicated solutions for further education of professional group of Sifas, which comply to the specific requirements of this group and which enable to react promptly to changing demands of the safety issues in dynamicly growing companies. Practical implications – The presented approach delivers a concept of a softwaremodule that could be implemented into Sifa-Community Forum. Due to evaluation with users, we could identify requirements and specifications of Sifa-Portfolio. Furthermore this concept can be transferred to variety of professional-groups, which are working in dynamic professions to support their work-related informal further education