Master's Program in Human Factors and System Safety

Currently two classes running in parallell

Below you find an introduction to our Master Program in Human Factors and Systems safety. We currently have two parallell classes in the program. Our next intake is planned to take place in January 2014 with applications due in October 2013. You are welcome to send in an application already and you find the application form and procedure if you follow this link.

A program introduction

(Frequently asked questions)

The Leonardo Da Vinci Center for Complexity and Systems Thinking is pleased to offer a complete Masters of Science program for professionals and practitioners in Human Factors and System Safety. The program starts with a week of intensive lectures and orientation in Lund, the rest you can do on-line, in two years. The MSc is concluded with a thesis. With no prior Bachelor's degree, you can still take the entire MSc program, and you will be rewarded a Testimonium upon completion.



This MSc is for everybody who wants to expand their knowledge and practical skills for the safety challenges of the twenty-first century. Its program offers you the latest thinking in the new view of human factors, accountability, accident models, and resilience engineering. The understanding of accidents, risk and safety is changing. We no longer see human error as cause, but as a symptom. We recognize the exciting possibilities of systems thinking for accident analysis and organizational improvement. We are shifting from reliability to resilience and the enhancement of adaptive capacity. We look for new relationships between stakeholders to create forms of accountability that do not harm safety.


"Most of all thank you to Sidney for the fantastic course that has enabled me to do a job good enough for my airline to want to employ me permanently during a time of crisis and downsizing. I could not have done it without the understanding I developed during the course."
Malin Castleton, Safety Officer Continuing Airworthiness

"My own impression is that there is a lot of talk about safety (and a number of programs out there teaching this stuff) but I haven't encountered a program so comprehensive and effective.
The Lund approach is unique and important, since most of us have such deep-seated opinions and values around human error and failure. This is not just about learning some new 'information'...it requires a shift in one's thinking."

Karen Cardiff,
Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, University of BC, Vancouver

"I could not have asked for anything better. There is this personal teaching quality that reaches out, encourages, mentors and develops every one of us in this thinking process—and then goes even beyond that point. Thank you for the opportunity to study under your wings. It really is an honor and an unforgettable experience of a life time."
Norbert Belliveau,
 Civil Aviation Safety Inspector

"Many, many, many thanks for a fascinating, eyes-wide-opening, and above all, challenging course! I learned so much, and learned that there is still so much to learn!"
Gwendolyn Bakx, Air Force Major

A program tailored to your needs

You will start with an intensive residential session of four days at Lund University in Sweden. The coming year (2013) the residential session will be from January 21-25. You meet colleagues from other industries, eager to learn and faced with similar questions. How do you write good recommendations? Can your company prevent drift into failure? How do you hold people accountable without invoking defense mechanisms? Do your operators have the courage to say ‘no’ when trading safety off against production pressures?

After the first residential session, and in addition to two more mandatory Learning Laboratories during the first year and other colloquia that we organize with either Lund staff or visiting professors from all over the world, the MSc is taught on-line. You get access to online lectures, reading guidance and on-line entry to the entire Lund University library. Tutoring assistance is always available. Each course is driven by your work on take-home questions and feedback from tutors and other students on your answers, through a highly interactive virtual classroom.

Almost all students take two years to complete the program, given the constraints of their (working) lives. In that case, your first year is devoted to studying the literature in synch with your fellow students. Every two weeks, you will answer a new question about the literature, and you will give and receive feedback to and from your fellow students, as well as getting feedback from your tutor. During the first year you will complete the first three courses. The second year is devoted to the fourth course (where you will get to write a literature review on your favorite topic) and your thesis that may well build further on that topic. Should you wish to complete the program in one year, you do the first three courses and the fourth course and thesis simultaneously. This may be ambitious if you have a working life, of course. We do expect your thesis to be connected to your professional concerns. Your employer won’t pay per class, but per year that you are registered with us.

Application process

The application form is now online and we are ready to process your incoming applications. Deadline for handing in applications will be November 10, 2011. 

Program cost and entry requirements

This MSc program is based on uppdragsutbildning, meaning it is intended for employers who wish to send their employees for further education. Swedish law does not allow students to pay for their own education, so we will need information from your employer about your sponsorship for the studies.

The tuition fee is 70 000 sek for every 30 ECTS that a student is registered with the University. The total fee for the program is 140 000 sek. The tuition fee does not include cost for books, travel or accommodation.

To qualify for the MSc degree, a previous Bachelor's Degree, approved by Lund University, is required. Those without a prior Bachelor's Degree are welcome to take the entire MSc program for credit, and will be awarded a Testimonium upon completion.

MSc Program Curriculum

1. Program formalia

Program name: Master program in Human Factors and System Safety—one year.
 Magister program (ett år) i mänskliga faktorer och systemsäkerhet.
 Major: Human Factors and System Safety
 Scope of program: 60 (ECTS)
 Level: Masters level
 Program code (LADOK): XMFSM

2. Program description

This program is intended for practitioners (for example pilots, air traffic controllers, engineers, physicians, nurse practitioners, managers, safety & quality personnel, investigators, CRM instructors), who have a prior Bachelors Degree and want to expand their knowledge and practical skills for taking on the safety challenges of the 21st century. Adding the Master of Science degree allows practitioners not only to update their knowledge and insights. Past experience has shown that it can also be a critical component in career progression or alternative employment. Some practitioners have chosen to continue with Ph.D. studies in human factors and system safety (typically at universities abroad) after the completion of their Degree. The teachings are connected to ongoing research of The Lund University Center for Complexity and Systems Thinking.
 
 Each of the courses will be taught every Academic year, and students can take up to two years to complete the program. The program is therefore offered as a part-time or full-time program.
 
 Relation to research
 The program is intimately connected with the dynamic research base of the Lund University Center for Complexity and Systems Thinking. The literature for the program reflects this commitment to the current research base, deferring to a few classic works where necessary, but focusing on the latest work as well, something that can be seen in various course books having been written by the program’s faculty.

The program also offers interaction between students coming from practical domains outside the university and graduate students at LU. This interaction ties those who are working fulltime on the latest research base on human factors and safety with those who are confronted by practical demands on safety and performance in real work settings. The interaction occurs inside of the courses, facilitated by group work and other assignments, but to a great degree also in extracurricular activities such as joint dinners after class.
 
 Career opportunities
 The Master of Science is a specialized program whose major is human factors and system safety. This program is designed to meet academic rigors for full preparation for doctoral- level studies, while at the same time preparing the students for immediate employment in real-world, cost-sensitive, and operationally driven environments. Graduates of our Master program have previously been found qualified to work (among other things) as directors of safety for airlines, hospitals, and regulators; as operational and maintenance safety personnel; as aviation industry ground and industrial safety personnel; as flight safety personnel; as incident and accident investigators; as designers; and as advisers or consultants to manufacturers, regulators, operators and other parties within safety-critical industries.

3. Learning outcomes

All four courses in the program aim to deepen students’ understanding, skills and knowledge so as to meet the exam’s goals (as stated elsewhere in this document). The thesis work intends to help students integrate the understanding, skills and knowledge acquired during preceding courses and apply these to a practical problem (preferably at their own workplaces).

Learning outcomes:
 Knowledge and understanding: After completing the program, the student will:
 - Acquire knowledge and understanding of relevant theories of organizational accidents and their progression over the past decades, as well as their interrelationships, commonalities, oppositions and some idea of their heritage.
 - Gain a specific and deeper understanding of phenomena that contribute to the risk of organizational accidents (such as normalization of deviance, drift into failure) and that mark their aftermath (such as different calls for accountability and learning or system change).
 - Attain profound insight into the latest developments in theories of human factors and system safety—particularly organizational, psychological and sociological—and their practical application to risk management and safety problems in organizations.
 - Appreciate the deep complexity associated with attempts to make progress on safety using any of the ideas learned in the program.
 - Know better where to turn for future competence development and education in the area of this program, by having been attuned to the various theoretical and philosophical positions and their practical implications for making progress on safety.
 
 Skills and abilities: After course completion, the student shall have:
 - Attained the ability and vocabulary to apply the new view of human factors and system safety in the analysis of complex safety problems, as well as in post-hoc examinations of system failure, even under conditions of incomplete information and residual uncertainty about what happened.
 - Become able to select and integrate applicable aspects of relevant human factors and system safety theory to the exploration of safety problems.
 - Developed skills in forensic analysis of human factors issues in accident investigation and in the consideration of possibilities for system change to prevent recurrence.
 - Developed their ability to work both independently and in interdisciplinary teams, particularly when it comes to constructive dialogue about safety problems with different stakeholders, as well as offering well-argued written opinions about diagnosis or proposed change.
 - Become able to help develop mechanisms for organizational learning, ranging from setting up viable event reporting systems to balancing pressures for accountability and retribution in the wake of failure.
 - Become able to help organizational decision makers balance both acute and lasting pressures of production against decreased safety and increased risk.
 
 Ethics and making judgements: After course completion, the student shall be able to:
 - Avoid judgmental language and jumping to conclusions in understanding past action.
 - Apply the ethical standards of scientific research methods (including how to deal with data) on upcoming thesis work and other future academic endeavors.
 - Understand the ethical implications and know the applicable ethical rules for doing research with people, should this be applicable to the student’s thesis.
 - Ethically regard the need for courage in organizational sacrificing decisions.
 - Learn to balance pressures for learning from failure with calls for holding those involved accountable and recognize the consequences of illegitimate calls for accountability.
 - Show a deep appreciation of the social context (and skills and vocabulary necessary to navigate it) in which organizational learning from failure takes place.
 - See both the social and scientific possibilities for, and limits on, making progress on safety in particular safety-critical domains, given its opportunities and constraints.
 - Be scientifically sensitive to the limitations of each model or explanation offered, and that the applicability of models can only really be gauged if their limits are known.
 - Understand the scientific importance of correctly referring to and referencing other people’s contributions both in scientific work and their own organization.

4. Course Information

Program structure
 
 The program aims to deepen students’ knowledge, skills and understanding of human factors and system safety. All courses focus students on engaging, contrasting and comparing advanced literature in the field, so as to augment their understanding both of substantive problems and methodologies for approaching them. A more profound understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods for investigating safety issues is sewn into all three courses, closely anchored to the course topic.
 
 The deepening of student knowledge and understanding in this Master’s program builds on their previous education and in many cases on their professional experience with issues of human factors, safety and risk at their workplaces. The program aims to give students a more profound appreciation, a more extensive language, and a greater suite of methods to handle the types of safety problems that they encounter in professional life.
 
 The program consists of four obligatory second-cycle courses (there are no electives because of the specialized nature of the program) and a thesis:
 
 FLM010 The new view of human factors & system safety, 10 credits
 FLM020 The sociology of safety and accidents , 10 credits
 FLM030 Accountability and learning from failure, 10 credits
 FLM040 Forensic safety investigation & system change, 15 credits
 FLM050 Thesis, 15 credits
 or
 FLM060 Project work, 15 credits
 

The first course lays the foundation for students’ subsequent development of ideas on human factors and safety by staking out the multiple philosophical positions. This allows them to extensively appraise the value and interrelationships of the various theories that are discussed in the second course. The third course will then directly address a central issue that is inevitably raised by the first two: what about accountability when progress on safety is about systems, not individuals? The final course transitions students’ deepened knowledge and understanding into more practical considerations about the investigating and changing of systems.
 
 Each of the courses is taught every academic year, but students will be recommended to take no more than two years to complete the program and to follow the order of courses as closely as possible. In order to complete each course the student needs to contribute to class- and online work, and pass a series of take-home examinations consisting of essay questions based on the course literature.
 
 All four courses aim to deepen students’ understanding, skills and knowledge so as to meet the exam’s goals (as stated elsewhere in this document). The thesis work intends to help students integrate the understanding, skills and knowledge acquired during preceding courses and apply these to a practical problem (preferably at their own workplaces).

5. Degree

Upon completion of the program a degree of Master of Science (One Year), major Human Factors and System Safety (Filosofie magisterexamen, huvudområde: mänskliga faktorer och systemsäkerhet) will be awarded in compliance with the National Higher Education Ordinance (SFS 2006:1053).

6. Admission requirements and selection criteria

The general admission requirements are as follows:
 
 a) A Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts Degree (or equivalent) in an area relevant to the Master program in human factors and system safety.
 

b) A good command of English language both spoken and written. For applicants who have completed higher secondary education in a Nordic country, or are native English speakers this could be verified by higher secondary education diploma/certificate (including English). For all other applicants a certificate of proficiency, such as IELTS or an equivalent, is desired but not required. For example,
 
 • an IELTS score of 6.0 (no less than 5.0 in any component) taken after January, 2000.
 
 • a Cambridge/Oxford Certificate in Advanced English, or Certificate of Proficiency.
 
 • O level/GCSE in English (minimum grade C).
 
 • a TOEFL test result of at least 550 points (213 computer based; 79 Internet based).
 
 The regulations in the general requirements concerning knowledge of the Swedish language are not applicable.
 
 Selection criteria
 Selection will be based on academic merits from university studies (100%). This implies that an assessment will be made of the grades for previous studies at the undergraduate level.

7. Other Information

Disciplinary actions against plagiarism
 The University views plagiarism very seriously, and will take disciplinary actions against students for any kind of attempted malpractice in examinations and assessments. The penalty that may be imposed for this, and other unfair practice in examinations or assessments, includes suspension from the University.
 
 Decision about grading in accordance with the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS)
 Courses at Lund University School of Aviation are graded according to the following principal grades:
 
 • Pass (godkänd, G)
 
 • Fail (underkänd, U)
 
 The Board of the School has decided the following translation into ECTS:
 Pass (G) translates into ECTS as A-E
 Fail (U) translates into ECTS as F
 
 The Board has also decided to pursue the internationally recognized steps in applying the ECTS scale:
 
 100-85 -- A
 84-75 -- B
 74-65 -- C
 64-55 -- D
 54-50 -- E
 49-0 -- F

 We look forward to working with you on one of the most exciting intellectual journeys of your life. Please do not hesitate to contact us on Johan.Bergstrom@lucram.lu.se

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