Stop By and Say Hi at the Northwest Facilities Expo, Portland, OR, March 19-20, 2014, Booth 419

Convergence Training Leave a comment

We’ll be displaying our best-in-industry training tools, including our safety training courses, our Enterprise Learning Management System (LMS), and our Contractor LMS at the NW Facilities Expo in Portland, OR on March 19 and March 20.

Come visit us at booth 419 and see for yourself why we make the best training materials for facilities-hands down.

If you want to touch base with us in advance, you can contact Convergence Training. Let us know if you have any needs we can address before the show!

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Come Meet Us at Tissue World Americas, March 18-21, Miami Beach, FL, Booth 690

Convergence Training Leave a comment

We’ll be displaying our best-in-industry training tools, including our tissue training courses, training courses on safety, HR, operations, and more, and our learning management systems (LMSs) at the Tissue World convention in Miami, FL, March 18-21, 2014.

Come visit us at booth 690 and see for yourself why we make the best training materials for this industry–hands down.

If you want to touch base with us in advance, you can contact Convergence Training. Let us know if you have any needs we can address before the show!

Convergence Training are experts in workforce training for pulp, paper, tissue, and corrugated industries. Click the links below to learn more about how we can help you. Download our FREE Guide to Online Paper Manufacturing Training

 

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Facing the Challenges of Process Safety Management (PSM) – an Interview with Sathy Rajendran

JP Dull Leave a comment
Process Safety Management (PSM) Image

Spills, leaks, and explosions involving hazardous chemicals have been responsible for some of the world’s worst industrial disasters. Because of the potentially massive human and environmental costs involved, companies that utilize hazardous chemicals in their manufacturing processes are subject to one of the most comprehensive (and complex) of OSHA’s regulatory standards: Process Safety Management (PSM).

We approached Sathy Rajendran, Ph.D, CSP, and Coordinator of Central Washington University’s Safety and Health Management Program, for a brief chat about PSM and what it takes to set up an effective program.

The interview is below and we hope you enjoy it.

And if you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see we’ve got a FREE PSM COMPLIANCE AUDIT CHECKLIST you can download. Nice!

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Check Out Our Training Materials at the ASSE Puget Sound Chapter & CWU ASSE Student Joint Professional Development Conference at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, Friday, March 14, 2014

Convergence Training Leave a comment

We’ll be displaying our best-in-industry safety training tools, including training for OSHA-based safety topics, MSHA-based safety topics, and our family of learning management systems (LMSs) at the Puget Sound Chapter & CWU ASSE Student Joint Professional Development Conference hosted by Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA on Friday, March 14, 2014.

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Free Incident Investigation Module – Fatal Phosgene Exposure

Jeffrey Dalto 4 Comments

We’ve got something that’s both old and new for you today.

It’s old in that this is another “freemium” safety training elearning course from your friends at the Convergence Training blog. That’s right, it’s free! You can watch it for free from here or download it and put it into your LMS for ZERO dollars and ZERO cents. That LMS does have to be SCORM-compliant, course.

However, it’s new because we’ve done something a little different this time. It’s not a standard training course, but instead it gives you and your workers a chance to investigate a real-life safety incident that led to a workplace fatality. This is something that one person can work through at a computer alone. But it’s also something you can work through with a group of workers in a safety meeting or in a series of safety meetings. We think it would create a lot of discussion and really get your workers engaged and involved.

We hope that this “Incident Investigation” module will lead to helpful discussions and maybe even help you improve your own safety program-if that’s needed. And if you’re interested in incident investigations, please read our extensive article explaining how to perform an incident investigation.

Convergence Training is a training solutions provider. We provide health and safety e-learning courses, make several learning management systems (LMSs), and create custom training solutions too. Contact us to ask some questions, view full-length course previews, or schedule a demo.

And since you’re here, why not download our free Guide to Effective EHS Training?

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Visuals and Effective Training Blog Post at OpenSesame’s Blog

Jeffrey Dalto Leave a comment

We just wrote a post about visuals for effective training that appears on the blog of our friends at OpenSesame.

The post gives some great tips for using visuals to help your employees learn more during their trainings–and who doesn’t want that? Plus, it includes some cool examples from the Convergence Training retail training course libraries. What’s not to like? Go check it out!

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4 Common Contractor Orientation Challenges

Jeffrey Dalto Leave a comment
Common Contractor Orientation Challenges Image

Let us guess: you need to provide site-specific orientations to contractors before they arrive to work at your site. And you’ve got to deliver other orientation materials to visitors and vendors before they arrive for their visit.

Are we right?

We can even guess some of the problems you’re having. Contractors arrive at your site without completing their orientation. It’s difficult to drop everything and train them as they show up, one by one, but it’s equally difficult to set up classroom-style orientations so you can do it with larger groups. Once the orientation is complete, you don’t have an effective way to store the records. Plus, it’s complicated to manage orientations that contractors have to complete every year or so, because you’re not sure who completed the orientation when. Or maybe you suspect that contractors are billing your company back for the fee they pay to complete your current online contractor orientation solution (which seemed like a bargain when you got it for free).

Are we onto something here? Sound familiar? If so, keep reading, because we’re about to outline some common problems companies like yours face when trying to provide contractor and visitor orientations.

Plus, we’ve included a link to our downloadable Contractor and Visitors Orientation Buyer’s Guide to help you sort this all out.

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Smart Ideas: E-Learning, Airline Boarding Passes, and User Experience Design

Jeffrey Dalto Leave a comment

Training and Visual Design Image

Part of my job is to meet with customers who have recently adopted the Convergence learning management system (LMS) and want some face-to-face instruction on how to use it in the most efficient manner at their work place. As a result, I do a good deal of flying.

And while I’m flying, I’m often confused when scanning my boarding passes. It’s hard to find the information I’m looking for—what is my flight number, when does my plane leave, and what gate do I need to get to? You’d think finding that information would be simple enough, but it’s not.

Well, apparently I’m not the only one who gets confused by this. NPR’s All Tech Considered blog recently ran an article about British designer Pete Smart (good name for this guy) who felt the same way. Except, unlike me, Pete Smart did something about it. He created a new design for boarding passes that’s brilliant. It’s easy to read, the information is clearly displayed in logical places and in larger fonts, and it’s even oriented in the proper direction based on the assumption that you dual-purpose your boarding pass as a book mark. Again—brilliant! (Or maybe I should say “smart!”)

These are tips you can use when designing your own elearning courses and other training materials, and most of this falls under the category of visual hierarchy. We’ll share some of those tips in the article below, and we hope you find them helpful when you’re creating your own training materials.

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Super Bowl Party Safety Training Suggestions

Jeffrey Dalto 5 Comments

safety training for the super bowl party image

The big day is coming up, and millions of people around the world will come together to eat nachos, drink beer, and share their opinions about new commercials.

Plus, the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams will play a football game. And so will some puppies.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a short list of training suggestions to get you ready for your Super Bowl party. That’s right, we’ve got some Super Bowl party safety training suggestions for you!

Before we begin, though, let us offer condolences to the New Orleans Saints and the Kansas City Chiefs, both of whom came close but didn’t attain the proverbial cigar. For the Saints, I’m suggesting our Incident Investigation course, because someone has to investigate how the refs didn’t call that screamingly obvious pass interference call. And for the Chiefs, how about our Near Miss course, given that the took LA to overtime.

We should also tip our hats to all four teams involved in the conference championship games–two exciting games that both went into overtime is about all we could hope for as fans.

Enjoy the game and remember to be safe!

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Teaching Attitudes: The Affective Domain of Learning and Learning Objectives

Jeffrey Dalto 5 Comments

Affective Learning Objectives Image

[This is the eighth in a series of posts about learning objectives. We’ve now compiled all the posts into a single downloadable guide to writing learning objectives if you want to check that out.]

As we mentioned in a previous post, there are three different kinds of learning: learning about things you can “know,” learning about things you can “do,” and learning about things you “feel.” We will refer to these as knowledge, skills, and attitudes, or “KSAs” for short.

In this post, we’re going to consider the “attitudes” domain more closely. The information below is based on the theories of Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia (1973), and it relies greatly on explanations of those theories that appear Don Clark’s well known “Big Dog Little Dog” instructional design blog. Check out Clark’s material on learning domains to read more about this and to learn about alternate versions of this hierarchy and other learning hierarchies.

You can use this information to create a more effective workforce training program.

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Making Sure Your Training is Effective-Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation

Jeffrey Dalto Leave a comment

Kirkpatrick Training Evaluation Image

Companies pour a lot of money into training. And of course, they hope that money is well spent.

That would mean that the training worked, in casual terms. Or, to be more specific, that employees learned things, developed new skills, and changed their behaviors at work, and those changed behaviors ultimately contributed to progress toward a business goal, such as increased workplace safety, higher production efficiency, increased sales revenue, lower total costs, the roll-out of a new product, or similar goals.

But exactly how do you know if your training was effective?

To figure this out, Donald Kirkpatrick came up with something now called Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation. There are other methods to do this, but Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels are a widely used method. They became very popular after he published his book Evaluating Training Programs in 1994.

We’ll learn more about the four-level Kirkpatrick evaluation in this article.

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