Ha all,
Sorry for the long silence! It was a bit too busy in my office lately. But now I have some time left before going to Schiphol Airport for an excursion, so I thought let’s take the advantage.
It is great to hear from all your experiences. Thank you for sharing! Until now I have read stories of case studies, real life simulators and canned data simulators. These stories make me very curious and now I am wondering what does it all look like in reality? Do you have pictures? I only have seen something from Vesa until now, but I am sure there is more to see and experience for us…..
Lih Mei when you are doing your case study simulations with the junior forecasters do you put any form of external pressure (by for instance using a clock) on this process? If yes, how do you do that? In what way do you present the data to the participant? Electronically, paper, all data sources at the same time or do you give the data with every time stamp? Who makes the case studies? Do you collect them in a sort of database?
The real life simulators..... I assume you are using a forecasting bench like all the forecasters are using in real life playing a shift with some supervisors who are also the opponents for the forecasters and all the product made stay within the building but are checked and criticized by the supervisors……is that true for every one? Or are there different ways to do a real life simulator session? With how many forecasters at once do you such a simulator session? One, or more than one? How many people do you need as supervisors? What are their tasks? What goes well during these sessions and what goes wrong? What do we have to keep in mind organizing these kind of sessions? Kathy-Ann I love to hear your experiences, your results and Do’s and Don’ts and Natalie I am pretty sure that you have some experiences we can learn from too. Last year I heard some experiences of the training with real life simulators in the initial forecasting course from the South African Weather Service. When the new forecasters were going to their work spot after this training they only had to do only 3 more on the job training sessions and then they could perform their job solo….this is impressive I think and that means that the real life sessions were really close to reality.
The canned data simulator session…..Natalie what does your canned data simulator look like. Do you have a simulator that looks exactly like the work bench from the forecasters and are all the production tools the same too? Or does it look different? How many people are trained at the same time? And how much staff do you need for that? Where do you get the data from used in this canned data simulator? Do you have multiple cases you can select one? How is such a tinned data simulator session prepared? Are there special thing you need to think of? Vesa…. you had a great experience using the simulator in your training as a warming up exercise. When you describe what happened I only see very positive points…which is great but I am sure that there are things you want to do different next time. What are they??
Lara you write that you have planned simulator sessions in October….What are you going to do during those sessions? What are your plans and how are you going to make sure that you are going to meet your goal during these sessions?
And then the dreamers Izolda en Roro…what are your dreams regarding simulators? What do they look like? What do you think you need to realize them? Do you see any problems on your way to realize this dream and if there are….are ways we can help you to make your dream to come true?
Now I probably have forgot some reactions on the posts…..sorry for that…but if you have stories we can learn from please tell us….
I have to run now to get my train, but soon I will tell some more of my experiences.
Hope to hear from you all!
Have a nice day!
Hartelijke groet,
Heleen