We’re excited to announce that two new modules have made it through production and are currently available from our online store:

Safety and Health – Basic
Safety and Health – Advanced

Both courses focus on explaining key safety information to employees, and both help fulfill the Safety and Health Programs elective in the OSHA 10 requirements for General Industry. Check out the following sample from the Safety and Health – Basic video:

Safety and Health – Basic topics include:

• Importance of safety
• Safety as a team effort
• Identifying and anticipating hazards
• Managing hazards
• Housekeeping
• Reporting hazards
• First aid and emergency care
• Emergency preparedness

Safety and Health – Advanced topics include:

• Working with machines, tools, and mobile equipment
• Chemicals, hazard communication, labels, and MSDSs
• Special jobs and training
• Ergonomics
• Machine guarding
• E-Stops, motion disconnects, and lockout/tagout
• Personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Clothing and jewelry

These modules will be an essential addition to your workplace safety training program. They’re both available now from BuyBetterTraining.com

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Work on our Hydraulic Fluid Safety video is finally complete and we’ve posted a sample clip to YouTube for you to preview. You can check it out below.

Hydraulics are critical in today’s world. Production at many modern workplaces would screech to a halt without them. But hydraulics can also pose hazards, and even cause injuries or deaths, if they’re not understood and used properly.

To get your workforce up to speed on hydraulics, our new module explains:

• How hydraulic systems work
• How hydraulic systems use hydraulic fluid
• Hazards presented by hydraulic fluid
• Guidelines for installation, normal operation, inspection, repair, and replacement
• Rescue and first aid guidelines

The new Hydraulic Fluid Safety video can be purchased, along with the rest our fine catalog of environmental and industrial health and safety videos, from BuyBetterTraining.com.

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We’re always hard at work producing new courses for our ever-expanding library of environmental and industrial health & safety videos, and today we’re happy to announce the completion of five brand new additions to our catalog.

The new courses, Safety & Health Basic, Safety & Health Advanced, Hydraulic Fluid Safety, Hot Work Safety, and Lead-Based Paint Safety, were designed to follow OSHA 10-Hour safety training guidelines and are intended to provide workers with the tools necessary to make smart decisions regarding safety in the workplace.

The creation of these courses followed a typical Convergence production timeline. Months of storyboarding & writing, followed by the tireless 3D & compositing work of our talented media artists, led to our extensive standards & review process. After making the necessary tweaks, cuts, and twists, the review process was followed, at long last, by today’s release of the new training materials.

Look for more details and samples of the new videos in coming posts.

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Convergence Training would simply like to thank the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless once again for the work they do to target the root causes of homelessness – limited access to affordable housing and too few living wage jobs in the Chicago area.

We’d also like to especially thank Michael Nameche, their Development Director, for being such a pleasure to work with and for personally transporting the furniture from our ASSE Safety 2011 Expo booth to the two women transitioning to an apartment from the homeless shelter.

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Check it out. Our friends at Caterpillar are promoting our MSHA Part 46 safety training products over on the homepage of their website. Cat has always maintained a strong focus on safety and we’re proud to be teamed up with them to help bring high-quality training materials to a broader market.

Check out the MSHA safety library over at ShopCatSafety.com, if you haven’t already.

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With a tagline like, “Bad Training SUCKS,” people know immediately that we’re a different kind of company. And at this year’s ASSE Safety 2011 Expo in Chicago, we didn’t disappoint.

We hired an actor/comedian, Matt Kissane, to be in-character impersonating “Matt Foley – Motivational Speaker,” made famous in several Saturday Night Live sketches starring the late Chris Farley.

The ASSE management actually came by our booth the morning of the second day asking if “Matt Foley” was going to be with us that day. We thought we might be in trouble because of the amount of attention he was getting. Just the opposite. They said if there was an award for the most entertaining booth, they’d give it to us, hands-down. We immediately suggested that it wasn’t too late for them to incorporate a “Most Entertaining Booth” award into their program and we’d happily accept.

And here’s Matt Foley, letting everyone know how Convergence Training can help get their training “back on the right track!”

OH&S (Occupational Health & Safety) Magazine also included a nice piece on us in their article, “Live from ASSE: Dirty Pictures and the Ghost of Chris Farley.”

Maybe next year, they’ll actually have our award for “Most Entertaining Booth” waiting for us.

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This year, at the ASSE Safety 2011 Expo in Chicago, we’re buying a selection of IKEA furniture for our booth (#1063) and working with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless to get the items to people who really need it. We think that’s a much more meaningful use of our resources than renting a folding chair and table skirt for a couple of days.

While trade shows provide a great opportunity for potential customers and product producers to meet, they can be costly and often wasteful. Printing marketing material, shipping display cases, renting furniture, and paying huge fees for space and services just for a chance to get face to face with prospective clients… We do all that… but we do it our way.

When we attend shows these days, we don’t rent furniture, we buy it and donate it to a local charity. We started this practice at last year’s Safety 2010 Expo in Baltimore MD. It’s just one way that we try to give something back to the community while we grow our business. It takes a little more coordination to buy the furniture and make arrangements with a charitable organization, but it’s really worth it.

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One of the many benefits of developing 3D animated training is that there’s always the opportunity to update and improve our models. As computing power increases and our development processes evolve, we get to take advantage of creating more complex and realistic 3D environments, machines, and people.

Here’s an example from our Trenching and Excavation Safety course, currently under development. The first image is what we’ve used in the past. At the time, it did the trick. But then, of course, this is a dynamic and ever-changing industry. And animators and 3D modelers characteristically like to push the envelope.

The second image is our latest model under development. It’ll be a focal point of our new Trenching and Excavating Safety course and it represents a much more sophisticated, detailed, and realistic piece of equipment. It’s the result of our increasingly refined skills, tools, and processes. Ultimately, that’s what defines an animation studio, constantly pushing the limits of what’s possible to create effective, engaging illusions that tell a story.

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June 12 -15 we’ll be exhibiting at ASSE’s Safety 2011 Expo in Chicago, IL. Last year’s show in Baltimore had an estimated attendance of 4,000. And with this year being the ASSE’s 100th anniversary, we expect even more attendees.

If you plan on coming to the show, or if you’re in the area, come by Booth #182 to experience our innovative 3D OSHA-based videos and learning management software. At the end of the show last year we gave away an iPad, flat screen TV, and massage chairs. Who knows what cool prizes we’ll give away this year. So stop by and talk with Bjorn Ansbro and Scott Rise. You’ll see some awesome training and you could just win big!

Visit the link below for more info:

www.asse.org/education/pdc11/

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Providing a secure and enjoyable experience for our customers is extremely important to us. So we make sure our ecommerce site is tested by one of the most respected names in software security, McAfee. And getting a big, green check-mark from them means a lot.

So shop with us worry-free. And if you ever have questions about our site or our products, just give us a call at 800.619.2280.

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