Training is a primary component of a comprehensive health and safety management system. Safety professionals face the challenge of not only identifying what regulatory issues and risks impact a business, but also how to translate that information into usable knowledge and skills for employees and management.
Dan Petersen once stated, "It is true that when you train you not only provide knowledge and skill but also motivation." (Petersen 1988) This comment balances the legal compliance issues of educating adults in the workplace with the pure need to equip employees with the tools that will motivate them toward health and safety excellence. Legal compliance is a driving factor in why many employers execute certain behaviors related to employee safety, but instead of focusing solely on compliance employers must realize that a decision made in selecting training curriculum is not simply a decision of compliance and cost, but one of having a true impact on employee learning.
As safety professionals we may often find ourselves caught between having the knowledge of what we need to do in the area of training and meeting the financial needs of our business. A training avenue that we may see as being the best for our situation may be deemed as requiring too much time for employees to be away from their work or as being too expensive, such as in the purchase of training materials or services. We may feel pressure to make it as cheap and short as possible to accommodate the needs of the business.
The reality is that training does require the dedication of resources. All of these resources have a price. Training material has a sticker price while time spent in a training session costs an organization in payroll. The key in the midst of the pressure we feel is to stay focused on principles of adult learning. This will help us stay on course and achieve the level of training excellence that we hope to reach.
A question we must ask ourselves is whether our goal in establishing a safety training program is to achieve compliance or to truly reach a level of excellence. The issue of compliance enters the picture when we think of the pressure to keep training cheap and short. Legal compliance can be achieved through very cost-effective avenues. We can produce Power Point training presentations, training documentation and tests. A 30-minute classroom session can be conducted and we can file all of the paperwork away proving that we "trained" our employees. But was the training effective? Did we take into account how adults learn and provide an experience for them that was beneficial and gave them tools to go back to their job and actually apply? Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't.
A paradox exists in that cheap and short is not always best in achieving the goals of management. But long and expensive is not always best in achieving our goals in safety.
