Expert Assessment of Nuclear Power Plant Personnel Performance as a Part of Professiography Research: Problems and Solutions

The article describes the methodological approaches and principles used by the author to overcome the difficulties encountered in the process of conducting an expert assessment of the professional success of nuclear power plant personnel. This procedure was part of a professiography research, and its purpose was to identify groups of the most and least successful specialists of various profiles, followed by an analysis of their psychological and psychophysiological characteristics. As a result of trial and error, the author concluded that reliable results can be obtained by consistently using a set of expert assessment methods, starting with a point assessment by experts of individual qualities of the evaluated specialists belonging to the same job group, continuing with the method of their alternative ranking based on professional success. At the final stage, the experts subdivided the ranked lists of evaluated persons of each job position into five qualitatively different levels according to this integral feature (from the most to the least successful). The algorithm of expert personnel assessment described in this paper has allowed minimizing the impact of some traditional problems that inevitably occur when solving such tasks. It was successfully applied by the author and his colleagues in the process of professiography research conducted at nuclear power plants.