Safety training: ways to use e-learning

Security training is traditionally done on-site, but more and more companies are seeing the benefit of moving some of this training online. While eLearning cannot entirely replace experience-based security training, it can provide useful follow-up and update material. After all, when it comes to your worker's safety, no expense should be spared!

In China, security training is actively conducted at companies in a variety of industries, including construction, transportation, mining, oil and gas, and more. In fact, safety training is even useful in offices, where employees need to know what to do in the event of a fire and how to prevent the spread of bacteria and disease. The recent fire in the CCTV building in downtown Beijing reinforced the need for office workers to be security conscious at all fire safety trainer.

New e-learning tools are available to implement security training faster and get the right information to the right people at the right time. How are companies going to be safer with eLearning? Here are four key themes:

1. Online security update courses. For safety training to be of maximum impact, it must be repeated several times for behavior to be learned. However, if you are operating in an industrial environment, it can be expensive and complicated to organize training sessions and get workers off the job. Therefore, an online tutorial after formal on-site training can help reinforce the main points and ensure that people do not forget what they learned. These refresher courses are typically short (no more than 30 minutes) to minimize time away from work.

2. Create a safe environment for training. With online training, your staff is out of the woods. Use simulations and see how your employees react to dangerous situations. For example, you don't want to burn down a building, but you can run simulations of evacuation plans to make sure everyone knows what to do in an emergency. The same is true for learning about bloodborne pathogens, pandemic influenza (such as H1N1, which is currently spreading worldwide), and dealing with bomb threats.

3. Proof of security awareness. Once a training session is completed, you must validate that the information has been received and retained. eLearning provides many tools to test and assess knowledge retention and security awareness. You can use a variety of quizzes, tests, surveys, and evaluations to discover what your team knows. The results of these tests will also help you plan future training sessions (i.e. focus on areas of weakness).

4. Reports of completion of security training for administration and regulators. Government regulators oversee security training for many industries (aviation, construction, logistics, healthcare, and many more) and have established strict guidelines for security operations. Reporting and training audit information is a huge headache for many industrial companies, especially when government regulators demand this information in the short term. ELearning tools allow companies to quickly and easily create reports for management and external audiences. Spending less time generating reports means that the safety training team can focus on more important things, such as preventing workplace injuries.

Using eLearning technologies can make workers more aware of the dangers they face on site and reduce both large and small incidents. Thousands of industrial accidents occur each year, and each accident avoided can make a real difference to the employees and companies they work for.