OPERATION VULCAN: 11 beyond skills analysis a new vision of craft skills

So far, in this Vulcan series, I have described how the analytical movement brought about a clearer appreciation of the nature of physical skills. There are several distinct concepts. First comes the separation of job knowledge from the skills. Job knowledge consists mainly of comprehension — an understanding of certain basic principles, theories, properties of the materials being processed, knowledge of how to calculate cutting speeds and rates of feed and so on. Skill is the mastery of the performance which operates on the actual workpiece or process. Job knowledge, being a form of comprehension, implies that the mental activity is conscious. Skill, while at the early developmental stage consciously‐controlled, is not truly a skill until most of the activity is adapted to take place within the subconscious level. The early stages of skill training communicate performance consciously but the function of repetitive exercises is to turn this conscious activity into a subconscious activity. The second principle is that skill performance is a sensori‐motor activity: that the performer is processing sensory information coming in from the task and that he uses the sensory input to control the motor or doing activity in continuous feed‐back. The contribution of the skills analyst has been to explore more fully the nature of the sensory feed‐back and to place this new knowledge at the disposal of the trainer, who previously had tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the actual doing part of performance. The third principle has to do with that sixth sense known as the kinaesthetic sense or the feel of the job when it is being properly performed. A fourth principle concerns the over‐riding importance of job analysis: the concept that training cannot be correctly designed without the task itself being analysed first. A fundamental point of job analysis is that it can be carried out at different levels of penetration and that one skill the trainer himself has to acquire is the ability to make the correct choice of that form of analysis which will optimise his results but minimise his use of effort and other resources.