Given the comments about "rotting your brain", I wonder:
Is this stuff effective because you *learn something*, or because *other people listen, now, when you tell them... because they know everyone's paying attention*...?
Rotting your brain is more because unless you take the
IATSE version, the typical
OSHA 10/30's have
lots of non-applicable topics like working in trenches.
There's also a degree to which the training is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator because the content of that training has to be accessible to everyone in a multitude of different trades, levels of education, and some of whom are apprentices that just started their first job in the construction industry a week ago.
I would generally question the effectiveness of the training in a
broad sense. At least in the short-term for someone working for an employer who doesn't care, people who don't care about
safety are going to walk out of that training still not caring. Then you have people who do care, but their employer or peers don't so it's an uphill battle. With
IATSE's version of the training, I think that has a stronger impact though because 1) it's tailored to be more relevant, and 2) it's a testament that the industry and the workforce are making
safety a higher priority. I also suspect the trainers care a lot more about the people in the room than with the general
OSHA training. You're more likely to get someone who understands your day-to-day and isn't just throwing lots of regulatory compliance information at you in a shotgun blast for the purpose of making someone else's insurance provider happy and so you don't ding their worker's
comp claims and
rating.
To that last
point...Working in construction, I've taken
a lot of
safety training over the years. Most job sites you cannot walk onto without stopping at the job trailer, watching a 30 minute video, signing your name on a sheet, and putting a sticker on your helmet. Out of all of those, the two most effective training sessions I've ever done were entirely dependent on the trainer. One was lift training where the trainer said "listen -- if you don't follow everything I've said here to the tee, it's not like you're going to instantly fall of a lift tomorrow and die -- but if you don't take anything away from this training and
play it fast and loose, maybe you're having an off day where you're feeling under the weather or something someone said to you earlier is bothering you or you're distracted by something at home --
never put yourself in a position where a stupid or silly
momentary distraction can be the difference between life or death. It only takes a second to take a step backward and fall out of a lift where the
gate is broken, doesn't latch shut, and you weren't wearing a harness or didn't have it clipped in."
The 2nd other session I found to be compelling was when there were 20-30 hardened, older construction workers who had seen it all. They grew up in an era where nobody took
safety seriously -- and they
all had stories and had seen friends seriously injured or die on the job. Some of them more than once. Many cried recounting those stories, and while I'm sure they all thought it was a
bit of a nuisance to keep
clipping in above 6ft, not one person left that training without feeling the emotional toll of what were entirely preventable accidents. The emphasis from the trainer came from a place of care that everyone gets to make it home safely to their families each and every day -- and that these regulations are written in blood. As opposed to, what 95% of
safety training normally is..."here's a bunch of inconvenient stuff you must do or someone's going to write you up or
send you home."
My takeaway from that is if you can get the training from someone in your own industry, for training that's tailored more to the hazards of your specific work, and who understands just how damning a "show must go on" mentality can be -- it is invaluable to receive training from someone "within the family."