Utilities Service Alliance (USA) is excited to announce Human Resources Consulting (HRC) as a new USA Supplier-Partner. To become a USA Supplier-Partner, the supplier is vetted by the member representatives making up USA’s supply chain team and awarded a USA agreement through one of the established sourcing channels. As a prerequisite to receiving a USA agreement, clear identifiable benefits and savings must be available to the members that are beyond what would be available to any individual member as the derived result of the members pooling all of their spend under a group contract. This new USA agreement provides HRC’s senior reactor operator/reactor operator success to the members at a discounted upfront price with an additional percentage amount paid back pro rata to the members through an annual rebate based on the total spend by all members each year. The S/RO Success is a senior reactor operator and reactor operator candidate screening process that helps managers evaluate candidates for selection into initial licensed operator training (ILT).

While the discount on the pricing is a benefit specific to the utility’s USA membership, HRC’s S/RO Success program provides significant benefits inherent to the service itself that is potentially worth much more than the discount. The average estimated cost of training a licensed operator is approximately $500,000 per individual, so each candidate training failure can be expensive. The S/RO Success program is designed to help plants avoid failures and improve training throughput. To assist in evaluating whether utilizing the HRC’s S/RO Success program is right for your site, we have outcomes from three U.S. nuclear plants that utilized this program.

Plant A. From 2010 to 2012, HRC screened 50 SRO’s for Plant A, and HRC recommended 30 of them. Plant A selected 20 candidates for the class, 19 of them were recommended and one was not recommended. A total of 18 candidates successfully licensed (90 percent throughput). HRC recommended 17 of the 18 successful candidates. HRC did not recommend one of the successful candidates, and two candidates recommended by HRC failed to license. The overall accuracy of HRC’s recommendations was 17 correct out of 20 candidates or 85 percent.

Plant B. From 2011 to 2012, HRC screened 51 SRO candidates, and HRC recommended 35 of them. Plant B selected 23 candidates for initial license training, 20 of them were recommended and three were not recommended. Twenty-two of the candidates successfully received their licenses (96 percent throughput). HRC recommended one candidate who failed to license. Two candidates, who were not recommended, successfully licensed (one of them failed on his first attempt but successfully licensed on his second attempt). The overall accuracy of HRC’s recommendations was 20 correct out of 23 candidates or 87 percent.

Plant C. From 2012 through 2015, HRC assessed 53 candidates, and HRC recommended 34 of them. Plant C selected 27 for ILT. Seven of the candidates are still in class. Of the remaining 20 candidates, HRC recommended 17. Eighteen successfully licensed and two failed to license for overall throughput of 90 percent. HRC recommended one of the candidates who failed. Three of the candidates who successfully licensed were not recommended by HRC. The accuracy of our recommendations was 16 correct out of 20 or 80 percent.

All three plants averaged 90 percent or higher overall throughput across multiple ILT classes. While many factors contribute to high levels of throughput, the accuracy of the S/RO Success recommendations appears to be one of them. Other important factors are the quality of training and the quality of recruiting. These three plants have skilled, long-tenured managers for their ILT programs, and both plants have effective candidate recruiting programs. While each USA member may vary some in their average ILT training cost per individual and their approach to screening and assessing SRO and RO candidates in their total success rates. The information and examples are intended to help sites understand the benefits of utilizing HRC’s S/RO Success program and begin the cost-benefit analysis for whether this service is right for your plant.

If you have any questions, comments or would like additional information or references, please contact Margaret Vinsant, Manager of Supplier Relations for USA, at mvinsant@usainc.org or 865-898-6274. Additionally, if you would prefer to contact Dr. Gary Kaufman, owner of Human Resources Consulting, directly, his contact information is provided on the USA Agreement Summary page for Agreement No. 2017-07-00. As always, you can contact your site’s supply chain department for additional information or a copy of any current USA agreements.