It's not easy to develop effective occupational environmental, health, and safety training. If you've been doing it yourself, you know this.
And what makes it worse, many times the people tasked with designing, developing, delivering, and evaluating that training are experts in certain areas under the "EHS umbrella" but don't have a lot of expertise in things related to training or learning and development. Sound familiar?
In this article, we'll give you an overview of how to improve the environmental, health, and safety training at your workplace, we'll link you to more extensive articles on each topic, and most importantly, we'll give you a free 60-page guide on creating better environmental, health, and safety training so you can apply it at work over and over again.
Please note that this article and the free guide at the bottom are based on ANSI Z490.1, the US National Standard of Criteria for Accepted Practices in Safety, Health, and Environmental Training. You might also be interested to know that ANSI Z490.2, an upcoming standard on online safety training, is currently in the works (check that link for an update on progress).
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To create better, more effective EHS training, use the five steps below:
We'll explain each of the steps further in the sections below, and the articles we link to and the free guide at the end of this article goes into much more detail.
Here’s what the guide will walk you through:
An effective environmental, health, and safety training program doesn't just happen or spring up organically.
It takes planning, organization, resources, guidance, and hard work.
Management of the environmental, health, and safety training program includes:
For more information about this, see the EHS guide below and/or our separate article on ANSI Z490.1 Sections 1, 2, and 3.
Designing and developing your training should never just be a process of grabbing a regulation and slapping some words on a PowerPoint presentation.
Instead, there's a lot you can and should do to design and develop effective EHS training that incorporates what we know about how people learn, including adult learning principles.
Designing and developing your EHS training will include:
Click any of the links in the list above, check out the free guide at the bottom, or click to read more about designing and developing effective EHS training.
Once your training materials are develop, it's time to deliver the EHS training to the workers at your organization.
Considerations for the delivery of your EHS training should include:
For more information, consult the links above, the guide at the bottom, or this article on delivering EHS training.
After you've delivered EHS training, you'll want to keep records for compliance and other reasons.
In doing so, you'll want to keep the following kinds of concerns in mind:
Click here to read more about EHS training recordkeeping and documentation.
It’s not enough to develop and deliver EHS training. You’ve also got to evaluate your employees to see if they’ve learned and evaluate your training program to see how effective it is and how it can be improved. Along these lines, you should consider:
For more on this, read our article on environmental, health, and safety training evaluation.
That's all we've got for you in this article, but before you leave, if you'd like information about selecting and using ONLINE EHS training, download the guide below.