Way back in 1970, the United States federal government passed the OSH Act. The OSH Act created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and all the OSHA safety regulations you’re familiar with.

We’ll tell you more about the OSH Act at the origins of today’s OSHA and the OSHA standards in this article.

This article is just one in a series of articles that we call OSHA Basics. The OSHA Basics articles cover fundamental issues related to OSHA like the OSH Act that this article covers. See the list and links at the bottom of this article for a list of our OSHA Basics articles.

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A quick heads up for you: deadlines for posting your OSHA Form 300A and electronically submitting your OSHA Form 300A injury & illness data at OSHA’s online submission website are both coming soon.

We’ve got the details you need to know below.

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This article is an interview on the topic of using visual literacy to improve occupational safety and the workplace, and in particular to improve hazard recognition and identification.

It’s another in our occasional series of interviews with various subject matter experts in training, safety, safety training, and related disciplines. In this interview, we’re talking with Doug Pontsler of the Center of Visual Expertise. They’re doing a lot of interesting and good work on applying the visual literacy skills we commonly associate with artists to occupational safety and heatlh.

We think we’ll find this topic helpful and interesting, so let’s get right to learning what visual literacy is and how developing our skills in visual literacy can help us improve occupational safety at the workplace. As you’ll see, there’s a recording of our discussion immediately below. If you’d prefer to read instead of listen, we’ve also typed up the transcript if you click the MORE button.

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If you’re thinking of using online safety and health training at your workplace, one reasonable question to ask is “What does OSHA have to say about online safety training?” You may wonder if they accept the completion of online safety training to satisfy safety training requirements in OSHA standards, for example.

Well, the short answer is yes. OSHA certainly does allow employers to use online safety training to satisfy the compliance requirements for mandatory occupational safety and health training.

We’ll flesh out that answer for you below, however, giving you some of OSHA’s explanations and linking you to some supporting documents at the OSHA website. And we’ll go a little further, as well, letting you know about a couple of ANSI/ASSP standards on environmental, health, and safety training that also support the use of online training for occupational safety and health training. We’ll even tell you what learning experts outside the world of safety and health have to say about the efficacy of online training.

Let us know if you have any additional questions about the use of online safety training at work, and do feel free to download our free Online Safety Training Buyer’s Guide Checklist as well.

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If you’re a safety professional, one of your job responsibilities is to provide safety and health trainers to the workers at your organization in order to teach them about workplace hazards and how to work safely in the workplace.

But what exactly should your safety training cover?

The simple answer is that safety training needs may differ for every employee, depending on his or her job roles, and may differ in different work areas or at different locations within one organization. The key, of course, is to provide training that makes each worker aware of the types of hazards they’ll encounter in the course of their work day, teaches those workers how to eliminate, control, or otherwise work safely in the presence of those hazards, and go home just as safe and healthy at the end of the workday as they were when they arrived.

However, it certainly doesn’t hurt to know the specific safety training requirements called for in OSHA standards. While compliance is never the final answer for safety and safety training at work (remember, compliance is the floor of safety, not the ceiling), it’s reasonable to want to know what safety training OSHA specifically calls for in their standards.

But the problem with this is it’s not so easy to get a quick answer. If you go to the OSHA Standards, you’ll quickly notice that….well, there are a LOT of them, some of them are quiet LOOOOONG, and it’s certainly not easy to skim them all and quickly find what you’re looking for.

But fortunately, OSHA’s created a single document that lists all their training requirements. As a safety professional who’s responsible for providing occupational safety and health training at the workplace, you should (and no doubt will) be quite happy to learn about this.

Read on to learn more about this and to get a copy of the OSHA Training Requirements document for yourself.

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Many times, when someone’s looking to get a learning management system (LMS) for his or her organization, they’re curious if the LMS can be integrated with other software programs at work. (Pro tip: by “integrate,” we mean what we’d call in lay-person’s talk the ability to pass data back and forth and “communicate.”)

Maybe that describes you, and it’s exactly the kind of question you’ve been wondering. Or maybe you’ve been looking at learning management systems, didn’t know about these kind of software integrations, but now that it’s come up, you’re definitely interested to learn more.

Well, the short answer is that yes, a learning management system CAN be set up so it’s integrated with the software applications at your workplace. And we’ll tell you a little more about that below.

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Back in October, during the annual National Safety Council Congress & Expo, OSHA announced their ten most commonly cited standards for the previous fiscal year (fiscal year 2017, in this case). You may recall that we published that OSHA’s Top Ten list as soon as it was out.

But every year, OSHA releases the Top Ten list in two forms–the shorter version they release during the NSC Congress, and then the same list with more information and data in final form in December.

As you no doubt know, it’s December, which means OSHA and the NSC has now released the updated and larger list and we’ve got all that additional information below for you.

And if you’d like a larger, more bird’s-eye view, we also have a separate article that shows the OSHA Top Ten Lists for recent years.

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