The Safety Training Ninja

Awesome addition to my safety reference library. Very informative.

This book is fantastic!It is geared towards someone who has been tasked to completely revamp their organization's reactive safety training. In other words, if your organization has experienced a number of accidents or near misses, and you, as a safety professional, are responsible for changing the training and bridging the gap that is causing them, this piece of literature is for you. For example, it speaks of methods to uncover said gap and determine who your audience needs to be. The book also elaborates on ways to design and develop comprehensive training that strays from the cliche "death-by-PowerPoint" method and instead, grab the audience's attention. Some methods discussed in the book include demonstrations, in-class activities, and brain storming. Before reading this book, I thought the only way to conduct effective safety training was to sit a bunch of people in a room, and read from a PowerPoint. My views on this have completely changed!I read this book because I have been tasked to create a brand new employee safety training program for my organization. It will include training on fire evacuation, voluntary reporting, ergonomics, off duty safety, first aid, CPR, and AED use... to name a few. As I stipulated earlier, this book is written for someone who has been tasked to conduct reactive safety training whereas my training is meant to be proactive. This is no issue, though. If you are in the same boat as me, think of the points in the book from a proactive stand point instead of a reactive one. For example, chapter 3 talks about analyzing your audience. It asks the question, "Has a stakeholder ever said that you need to conduct training because a seemingly unlinked set of accidents or near misses have been happening? How do you train when you are told to make everyone work safer?" The section then lists ways to find gaps in knowledge or performance, ex: speaking to supervisors or past analyzing reports, worker complaints, and safety audits. While my training is meant to be conducted before an incident occurs, these principles still apply. For me, instead of speaking to supervisors to find past gaps, I speak to them before an occurrence to find out what they identify the hazards and risks to be for winter weather driving, for example. In summary, weather you conduct your training before or after the incident/accident occurs, the content of the book still applies. You just have to rethink some of the ideas.

ASSP does it again with their new publication, "The Safety Training Ninja". Regina McMichael's knowledge and expertise within the realm of safety and risk management are outstanding and highlighted throughout the book. High recommend for all trainings and facilitators, for all organizational levels. Will be utilizing with my agency's Safety Committee. Excellent.

For me, much of this was review. However, there were plenty of nuggets of new (or at least stuff I had forgotten) to make this worthwhile. We're in the process of retiring our training program, and this book really got our teams juices flowing.