If it’s fall and/or winter, it’s flu season.
Knowing what the flu is, how to avoid it, and what to do when you have it can help you and the people around you stay healthy and limit sick time at work. So, we’ve created this free avoid the flu training course that covers the basics about the flu.
The course is based on information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hope this helps!
By now, you’re no doubt aware that the Ebola epidemic has spread past Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and a small number of other west-African nations and has reached nations in other continents, including the United States.
Given that, it’s a good idea to learn more about the Ebola virus and have a plan at your workplace in case the virus continues to spread.
In response to recent events, OSHA’s created a Safety and Health Topic website that provides a lot of helpful information about Ebola, including some aspects specifically related to the workplace. We recommend checking it out.
There are a large number of helpful resources on that OSHA site, but a few we found especially interesting are:
OSHA’s been busy making changes to the requirements for injury and illness record keeping and reporting.
In this post, we’re going to give you a screen-by-screen overview of a mock-up that OSHA created for their new injury and illness online reporting website.
If you’re in a hurry, scroll down until you see the first screen grabs. Otherwise, let’s take a short moment to review the recordkeeping and reporting changes first.
On the recordkeeping front, there are changes that affect:
These changes are covered in this recent Convergence Training blog post and at this webpage from OSHA.
On the reporting front, there have been changes that affect:
Again, you can read more about these changes in this recent Convergence Training blog post and at this webpage from OSHA.
Need an LMS, EHS training courses, or other help with your safety training program? Contact Convergence Training to learn more.
(Note: This article is based on the new, revised, 2016 version of ANSI Z490.1.)
Many companies, including probably yours, spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to maintain high standards for the environment, health, and safety (EHS). And rightly so.
And those EHS often involve an EHS training component, as it should.
One reason EHS training is important is that regulatory agencies such as OSHA, MSHA, EPA, DOT, and others require it. They have requirements about when to train and how much to train. They even tell you it has to be of a certain quality. For example, OSHA tells you that EHS training must be effective, that you have to ensure it’s effective through some form of assessment, and that you have to provide the training in a language the employee understands.
And yet, when you get your first job in EHS, nobody sits you down and teaches you how to design, create, and deliver effective EHS training. Nobody gives you a nice book on that, and it’s not spelled out in the EHS regulations.
But fortunately, we’ve got ANSI Z490.1 for that. ANSI Z490.1, titled “Criteria for Accepted Practices in Safety, Health and Environmental Training,” provides a national standard for creating, maintaining, and evaluating an EHS training program. Handy, huh?
In this article, we’ll give you a better idea of what Z490.1 is about and why you should buy a copy for yourself and use it.
I work with a lot of busy safety managers who are trying to improve their safety training programs. They’re typically looking for ways to use their time more efficiently while creating better training programs that have a real effect on their employees’ behaviors.
They hope they can reach these goals by using one of our learning management systems (LMSs) , or some of our 3D-animated online safety training courses, or both. And it’s true, they can.
Using an LMS and e-learning courses can save you time and also let you provide better safety training. But how? Well, some of the way are probably pretty obvious to you, and others may be things you haven’t thought of. Let’s break it down and consider some reasons.
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OSHA puts out a list of the ten most commonly cited standard violations every year. Here’s a list of OSHA’s Top Ten, 2016. Fall Prevention and Protection is on that list, and so we’ve got some online fall prevention training resources for you here–plus more.
Many of the same standards appear on the list again and again.
As a result, we’ve pulled together a series of blogs to help you train your workers about each of the ten most cited standards. Below, we’ve got a list of fall prevention and protection training resources for you.
Let us know if you’ve got some other resources you’d suggest. The comments field awaits.
Before you dig into the information about fall prevention and protection below, feel free to check out our short sample video that demonstrates a few highlights of our safety and health courses.
We’ve got some online HazCom training materials for you in this article. But before we get into it, let us set the scene first.
OSHA puts out a list of the top 10 most cited violations every year. Here’s the list from 2016. The hazard communication/hazcom standard is on that list every year. In fact, violations of the OSHA HazCom Standard (1910.1200) were #2 on OSHA’s Top Ten List of 2016.
Almost every year, the OSHA Top Ten list includes the exact same standards. Maybe there’s a little re-ordering, but that tends to be the big difference. So we’re pulling together a series of articles to help you train your workers about each of the top ten OSHA standards, and this article on hazcom is part of that bigger effort.
Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help with your workplace safety and health training. We’ve got safety and health online courses, a learning management system (LMS) for managing your safety training, and we can even make custom training for your workplace as part of a comprehensive safety training solution.
Before you dig into the information about hazcom below, feel free to check out our short sample video that demonstrates a few highlights of our safety and health courses.
OSHA puts out a list of the ten most commonly cited standard violations every year. Here’s a list of OSHA’s Top Ten, 2016. Scaffolding is on the list, and so we’ve got some great online scaffolding training available for you in this article.
Many of the same standards appear on the list again and again. As a result, we’ve pulled together a series of blogs to help you train your workers about each of the ten most cited standards. In this article, we’ve got a LOT of scaffolding training materials for you.
Let us know if you’ve got some other resources you’d suggest. The comments field awaits.
Before you dig into the information about scaffolding below, feel free to check out our short sample video that demonstrates a few highlights of our safety and health courses.
OSHA just released its list of the top ten most frequently cited workplace safety violations for fiscal year 2014.
The 2014 list includes all the same all the same standards as last year’s list, and the four standards at the top of the list appear in the same order that they did last year, too.
The biggest “riser” was lockout/tagout (1910.147), which checked in at #8 last year but jumped up to #5 this year.
We’ve got the full list for you below. For each common violation, we’ve given a link to the regulation, a link to our related e-learning course(s), and a link to a special page of informational resources and training freebies for you. Check ’em all out.
Need help with your safety training? Check out our library of e-learning courses on safety and other topics, and don’t forget to check out our learning management systems (LMSs) for delivering and tracking those courses. Or, contact us now for a demo.
We help a lot of our customers develop technical training for their workers–primarily for jobs in manufacturing and industry.
And in addition, we also lead a lot of technical training to teach customers to use one or more of our learning management systems.
And so we wanted to check out this book by the very well-known and highly credible Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark: Developing Technical Training: A Structured Approach for Developing Classroom and Computer-Based Instructional Materials.
We like her books for many reasons, but two of the most important are that they tend to be comprehensive and they are backed with research to determine if training techniques are effective or not.
We recommend you read this book if you’re interested in developing some technical training materials. But, if you’d like to get an idea of what the book’s about, we’ve written an overview below.
On September 11, 2014, we got news of some new OSHA reporting requirements that will go into effect on January 1, 2015.
Those changes will require employers to notify OSHA when:
All employers covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, even those who are exempt from maintaining injury and illness records, are required to comply with these new fatality and severe injury and illness reporting requirements.
The rule also updates the list of employers partially exempt from OSHA record-keeping requirements. According to OSHA:
“The previous list of exempt industries was based on the old Standard Industrial Classification system and the new rule uses the North American Industry Classification System to classify establishments by industry.” (Source)
(Since writing this post, we also used it as a basis for webinar. You can view a demonstration of the steps written below by watching our How to Create Custom Safety Training webinar, or simply read on if you prefer reading.)
For many companies with safety training needs, off-the-shelf e-learning courses like the ones we make here at Convergence Training are a great option. They provide affordable access to quality training on common safety topics. However, every work environment is different, with unique health and safety hazards, and one-size-fits-all training can’t meet 100% of your EHS needs 100% of the time.
If you rely on a learning management system to help you deliver your training, it can help to have some experience creating your own e-learning courses. There are some really simple tools out there that let you create your own, complete with interactivity and quizzes, to help you fill in any gaps in your EHS training library.
In this post, we’ll show you how you can create safety training with an e-learning authoring tool called Articulate Studio. When we’re done, you will have made an e-learning course that teaches crane operators to identify crane hand signals. The course will include a simple interactive slide show and a quiz. And then you can apply the process to create safety training materials of your own on any topic you wish.