All employees complete Health and Safety training as soon as they join our business as part of our Group Welcome training module. This initial training is supplemented with role-specific training for those of our employees in technical and operational roles, ensuring our people have appropriate skills and knowledge to safely undertake the work activities they are engaged to perform, as well as meet industry, regulatory, business, network and client requirements.
In 2022, around 350 of our leaders and managers completed Safety Leadership training. In 2023, 98 leaders from across our Group participated. This training acknowledges the important role leaders and people managers play in establishing a safety culture in an organisation and is intended to foster an enhanced safety environment and positively impact our ability to manage HSE risks into 2023 and beyond.
In 2022 the Group held more than 18,000 training events for our field workers, technical, and engineering employees in order to maintain and enhance their critical skills and capabilities, as well as formal accreditations where applicable, including health and safety. In 2023, we delivered around 101,000 hours of training to maintain critical skills and capabilities for our field crews and other team members working on our gas and electricity assets, as well as obtaining formal skills and accreditations where needed. We also have a partnership with Engineers Australia which supports eligible team members to become Chartered Engineers.
We have an agreed set of competencies for many of our field workers and technical staff, including our Project Engineers, Project Managers, Construction Managers and Engineers. This means there is now an agreed set of expectations about the skills and level of expertise required of people undertaking these roles in our business.
We maintain a record of field-worker and contractor training, licences, competencies, accreditation and insurance details in our Worker Authorisation System (WAS). All contractors must be registered and compliant in this system prior to starting work in the field. We also require all those registered in the system to carry a WAS card on-site.
