Digital EHS Training Is Making ‘Learning From Your Mistakes’ A Thing Of The Past

Digital EHS Training Is Making ‘Learning From Your Mistakes’ A Thing Of The Past

Employee EHS training is an extremely valuable tool for EHS professionals. Not only is training essential to maintaining compliance, but it is also a primary corrective and preventative action used to drive forward EHS best practices and build a strong safety culture amongst employees. Like many EHS processes, training is undergoing a period of widespread digitization, with 83% of Verdantix Survey respondents reporting they used a form of software to assist safety learning. In response to corporate appetite for eLearning, software vendors such as Cority, Health and Safety Institute (HSI), KPA and SafetySkills, have dedicated significant resources to their digital EHS training offerings. In order to guide EHS professionals on adopting the right technology for EHS eLearning, Verdantix has released a Best Practices report, detailing the key considerations firms should recognize when undertaking training digitization projects.

Digitizing training can bring with it many benefits. From an administrative perspective, learning management systems (LMSs) make it easier for firms to disseminate training to the correct stakeholders and record completion, greatly reducing the leg work required from EHS professionals. Secondly, digitally enabled content is available on demand, allowing employees to complete it at their own pace without impacting productivity. Mobile accessible eLearning allows workers to view training content efficiently, enabling them to conveniently review and replenish their safety knowledge quickly and effectively. Firms using eLearning can drastically reduce their training expenditure and using a wide variety of digital training methods, can provide an engaging solution for employees. Lastly, by linking LMSs with EHS management systems firms can cross analyse training data alongside safety performance, allowing them to determine training initiatives that proactively address on-site risks.

In order to reap some of the benefits driven by EHS training digitization, health and safety professionals must be cognisant of several best practices. Initially, firms must address the people, process and technology change management issues that are associated with any tech implementation projects, this is especially important as training success is pivotal on employee engagement. Secondly, firms should leverage a blended range of digital training methods, such as gamification, microlearning and immersive scenario training to best support the specific learning needs of their employees. A must for firms is integrating their LMSs with other EHS processes. Weaving eLearning within their EHS ecosystem allows firms to proactively assign training to employees in line with key data trends, greatly reducing incidents as a result of inadequate safety knowledge or poor safety behaviours.

To gain deeper insight into the most effective ways to digitize EHS training, please read our Verdantix report Best Practices: Adopting Technology For EHS Training.