ABSTRACT
Ergonomics has always been concerned with the development of operators, although this has not been at the heart of its research issues (Waterson et al., 2012). In France, it has only been since the 1990s that ergonomics has truly tackled this issue, in particular through the goals of transforming and designing work tools and work situations – typically, in the case of situations and tools for which it was compulsory to take into account the professional skills involved, as well as their potential transfer and the related training practices. Hence, the concept of skill gradually became
Skills as a vector of health and performance ................................................. 4 The preservation of health through the development of skills .............. 4 Acting and understanding: conditions for constructing performance? ................................................................................................. 5
Work environments for the development of skills ........................................ 7 Favourable conditions: Potential situations of development and mediation ........................................................................................................ 7 Detrimental conditions: Between strong prescriptions and uncertainty ..................................................................................................... 8
Designing training systems: The development and transformation of work ................................................................................................................. 9
Work analysis as a means to construct the external consistency of a training system ......................................................................................... 10 Work analysis as a tool and an object for training .................................. 11 Analyzing activity during training programs in order to strengthen their internal consistency ....................................................... 12
Discussion and conclusion .............................................................................. 13 References .......................................................................................................... 14
essential in order to account for the fact that the activity of operators is neither haphazard nor completely predictable, and that it cannot be reduced to a list of instant behaviours. More recently, ergonomics has made this one of its main goals, through the concept of ‘enabling environments’ (Falzon, 2008).
