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Safety training is traditionally done on site, but more and more companies are seeing the benefit of moving some of this training online. While eLearning cannot replace experience-based safety training entirely, it can provide useful follow-up and refresher material. After all, when you are dealing with your worker's safety, no expense should be spared!

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In China, safety training is actively conducted in companies in a variety of industries, including construction, transportation, mining, oil & gas and more. In fact, safety training is even useful in offices, where employees need to know what to do in case of a fire, and how to prevent the spread of bacteria and disease. The recent fire in the CCTV building in central Beijing reinforced the need for office workers to be safety-conscious at all times.

New eLearning tools are available to roll out safety training more quickly and get the right information to the right people at the right time. How are companies going to be safer aerial work platform certification with eLearning? Here are four key themes:

1. Safety refreshers courses online. For safety training to be of maximum impact, it has to be repeated several times so that the behavior is learned. However, if you are operating in an industrial environment, it can be expensive and complicated to organize training sessions and take workers off the job. Therefore, an online tutorial after formal onsite training can help to reinforce the main points and make sure people do not forget what they learned. These refresher courses are usually short (no more than 30 minutes) to minimize time off the job.

2. Create a safe environment for training. With online training, your staff are out of harm's way. Use simulations and see how your employees react to dangerous situations. For example, you don't want to burn down a building, but you can run simulations of evacuation plans to make sure everyone knows what to do in case of an emergency. Same goes for learning about bloodborne pathogens, pandemic influenza (like H1N1, which is currently spreading in throughout the world) and dealing with bomb threats.

3. Test for safety knowledge. Once a training session is complete, you need to validate that the information has been received and retained. eLearning provides many tools to test and evaluation retention of safety knowledge and awareness. You can use a variety of quizzes, tests, surveys and evaluations to find out what your team knows. The results of these tests will also help you plan for future training sessions (i.e. focus on areas of weakness).

4. Safety training completion reports for management and regulators. Government regulators oversee safety training for many industries (aviation, construction, logistics, healthcare, and many more) and have established strict guidelines for safety operations. Coming up with reports and training audit information is a big headache for many industrial companies, especially when government regulators demand this information on short notice. eLearning tools allow companies to quickly and easily create reports for management and external audiences. Spending less time generating reports means that the safety training team can be focused on more important things - like preventing workplace injury.

Use of eLearning technologies can make workers more aware of the dangers they face onsite and reduce incidents both large and small. Thousands of industrial accidents happen every year and every accident prevented can make a real difference for employees and the firms they work for.

We call the methods or materials used to teach safety as safety training tools. This training includes being safe as an individual and safety on the job. It therefore has the same concept when looking at any subject. Safety training is important because it helps a person to operate at his or her best. You can get safety-training materials from many companies that use training tools such as CDs, DVDs and materials that are either printed or electronic and from seminars.

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The benefit offered by printed materials is that one can use them for reference at any specific time including when there is no electric power. It is also easy to distribute them out to customers or people visiting you for all you need to do is place such brochures at certain places. You can also display posters for easy reference because even employees will not have an excuse as to why they did not follow the information displayed. Having this information always on display will make sure that your work site is always safe. Another option you can use is to have all employees keep small printed safety training materials in their pockets so that they will refer to the rules constantly.

If you have a computer, e-books, emails and software are a good way to provide safety-training materials. E-books carry the advantage that it is possible for the user to find information quickly because word processors allow for the searching of specific words contained in the document. Therefore, the person searching for information is not required to read the whole document for it is possible to skip until the word you are searching for occurs again. E-books also offer the benefit of easy transfer from person to person because this happens electronically. The method similar to e-books is e-mail for they work in the same way and it is possible to send e-books by attaching them in an e-mail. The other benefit is that you can send a mass email to all employees or clients to update them on safety training.

The other method that will work well with those who prefer hand-on training is through setting up seminars that will train them directly. It is possible for the participant to enquire from the instructor or from other participants. The other advantage of seminars is that a participant can get information more clearly than a printed document because another person can describe an issue that is not clear. The reasons for this are that some experiences that occur in real life such as first aid are not easy to describe in a book. This is because a person cannot feel or touch the first aid description.

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Safety training is permanent for it can help you in all your future life and you can share the information with others. The people who can benefit from your training include your children and besides teaching others, you can help them by the application of your knowledge in specific situations. The advantage is that you can share the information learned from any particular type of safety training tool with family members or co-workers.