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It’s five minutes past the start of your training course and ¾ of the class still hasn’t arrived. Those participants that showed up on time fidget in their seats and look impatiently at their watches. Somebody runs to a phone and fifteen minutes later you finally get started to a class a third of the size it should be. Sound familiar?

Let’s face it, many companies do a poor job of safety training, the participants rarely retain or apply the things they learn, and except for complying with government regulations little is accomplished. Safety training is required to protect workers, so why should we have to fight with people to get them to complete the training? The most common reasons given for resisting safety training include: the training is boring, the material is common sense or doesn’t pertain to me, and we only do it because we are made to go – not because we expect to learn anything useful.

Safety training boring? How could anyone say such heresy? Well, the reality is that most people are turned off by someone reading off PowerPoint slides that literally contain a government regulation. And as for the training not containing information that applies to them, I challenge participants to find a safety topic that doesn’t apply to them.

Years ago I worked seasonal help delivering packages for a postal delivery company. I had a one-hour course on lifting and carrying packages. Now, given that I would only be working a maximum of six weeks and would not likely be pursuing this work as a career, it would have been easy enough for me to dismiss the class as pointless compliance. Instead, I was surprised to learn useful skills that I remember and use to this day. What was the difference between this course and the hundreds of safety courses I’ve been made to endure over the years? Simple: This course was effectively designed, expertly delivered and, believe it or not, you can do the same with your safety courses by following some basic rules.

RULE 1: WRITE GOOD OBJECTIVES
Good course objectives are like a checklist of the topics you want to cover. The more time you spend writing strong objectives, the easier it is to write the rest of your course. When writing course objectives, ask yourself two questions: “What do I want the participants to be able to ‘do’ when they leave my training course?” and “How will I know the participates are able to do the things I presented?”

Note that I said “do” and not “know”. The best objectives are measurable and observable behaviors, and while it’s pretty easy to measure what someone can and cannot do, it’s darn near impossible to tell what someone knows, unless there’s an accompanying observable behavior.

In broad strokes: when we talk about imparting knowledge we are talking about “education” and when we talk about teaching a skill we are talking about “training”. Put another way, you may be in favor of your fifth grader getting sex education, but probably wouldn’t be crazy about him or her getting sex training. Every good instructional objective will have three elements:
1) Identification of the skill expressed using action verbs
2) Criteria for success
3) Measurement parameters

Identification of a skill, using action verbs, may seem fairly obvious. But when you sit down with pen and paper and try to write an objective that clearly identifies the skills you want to impart, it can get difficult, even frustrating. Action verbs denote a person doing something, which is important when you are trying to provide skills training because when you train someone, you really want them to DO something. So when you write an objective, it’s crucial that you use an action verb to describe what you want the participants to be able to do. Table 1 is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start.

Establishing a criteria for success also seems easy, but it can be even more difficult that describing the skill. Once you’ve determined what actions the participants will be able to perform, you need to identify how good is “good enough”. The perfectionists among you will demand 100 percent and that’s laudable, but it also sets up an unrealistic expectation plus the likelihood that you will end up retraining a boat-load of participants who will never pass with 100 percent accuracy.

I like to use the 90-90-90 rule. This rule holds that the course will be judged effective when 90 percent of the participants are able to demonstrate 90 percent of the skills with 90 percent accuracy. And as good as this rule is, it’s a stretch for a lot of courses. But it’s still a nice target, and when we are doing safety training, I really think it allows us to set the bar a little higher than we might ordinarily.

Okay, so now you’ve decided what you want the participants to do, and how well they have to do it, you must establish some way to evaluate how “good” is “good enough”, and for that we need clear measurement parameters. Defining measurement parameters can be a lot trickier than it appears at first blush. Let’s say you’re putting together a course in “Right to Know” and you’ve decided that you want the participants to be able to understand their specific legal rights. It’s impossible to observe a person’s “understanding”, so you will need to write an objective that identifies behaviors that you can observe, but that also demonstrate an understanding of the content. Using our action verbs you might write something like:

RULE 2: FOLLOW A SIMPLE COURSE DESIGN MODEL
If people think safety training are boring, then they haven’t talked to a lot of Instructional Designers. These clods will bury you in hours of jargon and complex models largely developed by academics for academics, but if you listen closely and are able to stay awake long enough, you just might find that some of the things they are telling you are worthwhile.

I’ve taught many Train-the-Trainer workshops where the participants follow a simplified course development model that seems to work pretty well for subject matter experts who are pressed into doing training. The model I teach in these sessions is simple (“it” refers to a skill you are trying to teach):
1. Introduce it. Adults need to understand why they should learn the skill you are trying to teach, and believe that learning this skill has something meaningful and valuable in it for them. When you introduce a skill quickly and convincingly let the audience know the WIFM (“what’s in it for me?”).
2. Define it. When you define the skill, be specific about exactly what the skill is, and – where appropriate – is not.
3. Explain it. Once you have defined the skill, you need to explain the context in which the person will use the skill, and provide the participants with criteria so they can judge whether or not they are correctly applying the skill. Far too often skills are defined in such vague terms that the participants what they are expected to learn.
4. Illustrate it. Using examples, visual aids, or other means, illustrate what the skill looks like when being properly applied. Here is where drawing on your experience and telling war-stories can help you to get the point across. You can also share how you came to understand a concept or tricks that you used while learning a skill.
5. Demonstrate it. Demonstrating a skill is crucial, both in building a skill and maintaining your credibility. Demonstrating a skill allows the participant to see how the skill is correctly performed and can ask questions to clarify things that they may not understand.
6. Allow people to practice it. Once people have seen the skill, they are ready to try it themselves. While they practice the skill you should be providing guidance and coaching so that people are able to refine the newly acquired skill in the safety of a supervised situation.
7. Evaluate it. If you wrote a good objective, evaluating the participant’s progress should be very easy, all you need do is to compare the participant’s demonstration of the skill with the criteria for success you established in the objective.

Remember: Not everyone will be successful the first time they try to demonstrate the skill. As a successful safety instructor, you must repeat the demonstration and practice steps until you are satisfied that the individual is able to correctly demonstrate the skill. By following these seven steps for each of your topics you should be able to effectively build the skills that you are supposed to be teaching, of course designing a course around these simple steps is a lot harder to do than it first appears.

Now some of you are probably thinking, “yeah right, sounds good on paper, but those steps really can’t be applied in a Health and Safety training course. Okay, let’s say you’re teaching a course in “Right to Know” or “Hazard Communication” and you’ve written an objective something like this:

For our first step, introducing the topic you might say something like, “a Material Safety Data Sheet is a document that contains important information about the characteristics and actual or potential hazards of a substance.”