Oil Sands & Construction Training & Safety Ltd. (OSCTS)

1928 74 St. SW. Edmonton, AB. T6X 0K3

780-983-0155

In-House or Contract Trainers

Below is a discussion of few issues involved with providing training to workers. Setting up proper training to be provided to your workforce must be made based on informed decision to get most of every dollar spent on training.

Training is the first line of defence in construction. Well and proper trained workers are safer workers with lesser accidents and equipment damage on the site.

Having well organized and maintained training program will create safer company by reducing accidents and costs associated with them, allowing company to bid for better contracts due to the good safety record, and proving that your company complies with all the workers training requirements to perform work on the project.

In house or contract trainers / Professional, experienced trainers who can deliver high quality training of variety of training programs your organization requires are hard to find and do not come cheep. To help you with cost effectiveness for hiring of in-house or contracting external training provider, check our Blog “Cost Effectiveness of In-House or Contract Training” spreadsheet
Training requirements / Depending on the profile of operation, quite a range of training programs may need to be delivered, some of them highly specialized. In-house trainer or contracted training organization should be able to deliver most of them, and database of providers of highly specialized training programs providers need to be established.
Convenience versus cost / Not always cost saving is the highest priority. In-house trainer can delivery urgently required training on day notice when required without need to wait for external training provider to schedule delivery. This flexibility may allow you to perform job required by client straight away without delay, and not to lose it to the competitor who can supply trained workforce to perform work on a very short notice.
Field safety personnel delivering safety training / Depends a lot on the training requirements and size or your company safety department. Usually short orientations can be done. With delivery of longer (e.g. 6 hours) courses and follow up paperwork, your safety person is lost of the whole day from field duties. Or if you do not have too many safety professionals on the site and there is an accident, training must be stop for the time being due to the activities regarding accident, accident investigation and follow up. After a while you need to consider spending money on training your safety person as a safety trainer, or hire safety trainer learning convenience of having trainer on-hand
How many courses should trainer be able to deliver? / This question is very person dependent. There are trainers who can deliver limited number of courses on start, but can be put through train-the-trainer process to deliver wide variety of programs. Oil Sands & Construction Training & Safety Ltd. can help you find safety trainers delivering required training, as in-house or contract trainers.
Cost of presentation equipment / Depends on type of training cost of presentation equipment needs to be considered. Fire simulator for fire watch training run over $10,000.00, the same goes for equipment for quantitative fit testing. Cost of SCBA/SABA equipment for training can be also expensive. Calculations need to be made on long term cost effectiveness of buying versus renting of equipment, or hiring training organization which already have equipment required to deliver training
How often certifications expire? / Most certifications are good for 3 years, but some may expire sooner. Do not wait with re-certification training for the last minute, as if there is an urgent job (and usually are) you may find that there are no workforce to perform tasks, as too few are certified for what they need to do
How many workers are retained, how many stay, how many go during the year? / In construction or maintenance 50% yearly turnaround of workers is nothing unheard of. Your training support must be able to cope with so high numbers of new workers needing initial and all other training needed to allow workers to work
How many locations company have and what is geographical location / If you have few locations, then onerotational trainer can serve all of them. Depending on number of workers, geographical distribution of locations, more than one trainer may be required.
Is training province/territory specific or how difficult it is to modify existing training to the provincial/territorial regulations? / Some programs, like fall protection, may differ in requirementsfrom province to province. Some training programs can be modified towards differences in requirements, or trainers can master delivery of programs for different provinces. Another option is to create company/province version of training materials. Program created for one province can be easily converted (changes in legal requirements) to different provinces. Or owner of the training materials can modify them for you.
Finding the safety programs. / Quite a few train-the-trainer programs are provided by provincial construction safety association. They provide established train the trainer programs, and often training materials like students’ books, and certifications can be purchased at a very reasonable price
Retaining Trainer / One of the options to have in-house trainer is to train one of the workers or safety people to deliver training programs required in your workplace. Hazard is that after being able to deliver full range of programs person will start looking for better pay or full time and better paid job as a safety trainer. This is an on-going industry concern.
Classroom versus on-line training / Some programs can be taken on-line; some should be delivered in-class. Nothing beats classroom delivery by good trainer. Additional information, field examples and trainer-student interaction allows workers for better retaining of material. Example would be a generic WHMIS program which can be taken on line, or in-class with delivery based on chemicals used on site
Rotational Training / Another alternative is to engage training organization to setup, e.g. every three-month rotational training schedule for every location and provide series of training courses. It would allow for more organized scheduling and training provided in not so busy times
Cost effectiveness / Unless you have unlimited funds, cost effectiveness of company operation affects the bottom line. Training is no exception. Hopefully above discussion will help you to make right decision towards your training needs
To help you with cost effectiveness for hiring of in-house or contracting external training provider, check our Blog “Cost Effectiveness of In-House or Contract Training” spreadsheet

Oil Sands & Construction Training & Safety Ltd. can help your organization with finding in-house trainers, provide trainers to provide individual training, series of safety courses, rotational training, or organize groups of trainers for shutdowns or maintenance jobs.

For inquiries, please contact Cezary Giluk, OSCTS Program Development Coordinator, 780-983-0155,