Welcome to Safety Watch, a newsletter that provides an update on current loss-control regulatory and technical issues.

CONTENTS

Beware when driving near large trucks (cover page)

Employees' off-the-job injuries can be very costly to employers

Online training can help streamline your operations

Methods for selecting proper hearing protectors

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Online training can help streamline your operations

NATLSCO Risk and Safety Services offers a broad array of online training programs, including this one about fire safety.

Online training, or Web-based training (WBT), is getting more attention as organizations look for ways to do more with less.

At a minimum, required regulatory safety training for employees must be completed on a periodic basis, and many companies are turning to WBT to assist their efforts.

But what are some of the benefits of online training? To start, WBT can reduce training time by an estimated 40 percent to 60 percent when compared to traditional classroom-instructor-led training, according to Brandon Hall (www.brandon-hall.com), a WBT expert.

What about employees’ training retention? The American Society of Training Development indicates that self-paced learning such as WBT achieves the same or higher degree of learning as traditional instructor-led courses.
Here are a few other benefits of WBT:

Flexibility

• Online courses can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, virtually eliminating scheduling and shift-training issues. Courses are available when individual students have downtime.

• Course content and features are centrally stored and can be updated quickly, allowing the latest information to be available for training.

• Many WBT courses are available in multiple languages (for instance, English, Spanish, French, etc.) or can be easily translated to meet your needs.

• Feedback features allow communication between students and administrators with content questions or comments.

• Online courses can be customized to include company-specific policies, procedures and graphics. This can make WBT courses more meaningful to your employees.

Improved documentation/reporting

• Most WBT applications have built-in flexible reporting systems that centralize training records for documentation purposes. This can ease the burden of managing regulatory compliance training and demonstrating that your obligations have been met.

• Curriculum-based course assignment capabilities can be identified by division, location, department or position, which allows scheduling and tracking.

• Web-based courses can include quizzes and tests for retention tracking and evidence of training effectiveness.

All this translates into time and money savings, especially if you take into account reducing or eliminating traditional training costs such as on-site instructor time, scheduling, preparation time and hard-copy course materials.

In fact, most online training implementations can cost almost 50 percent less than instructor-led classroom courses. These are just a few of the benefits your organization can realize by using online training.

Of course, there are always exceptions. You may have employees who consider themselves computer illiterate or are adverse to online training.

Some “hands-on” training also may be necessary to meet regulatory employee training requirements (for instance, personal protective equipment donning and doffing, lockout/tagout authorized-level machine-specific application training, etc.).

The good news is these issues are often a small part of your training procedures. The bulk of your classroom-training obligations can be addressed via WBT, allowing you the time (and money) to address more specialized training needs.

Many available WBT systems include courses on hazard communications, confined spaces, emergency response and violence in the workplace, to name a few.

Course offerings often go beyond safety to cover human resources, quality and productivity topics.

If you have not looked into what online training has to offer, you could be falling behind the competition. WBT may not solve all your training needs, but it can certainly help the cause.

For more information or assistance regarding this topic, please contact:

Tony Zoia, MS, CSP
NATLSCO Risk and Safety Services
Phone: 800-323-9585, ext. 5379
Fax: 847-726-5271
E-mail: azoia@us.bureauveritas.com