A Black Eye for Safety Trainers

I read with interest and disgust an article in the NY Daily News about the selling of OSHA 10 hour cards by so-called instructors offering the class in bars and taking only about 2 hours to complete the course. These people give the rest of us a bad name!

If you are an OSHA authorized construction outreach trainer, I suggest that you read the article (click here). There are a couple of facts that jumped out at me. First, there are only 39 construction outreach trainers in NYC. I find it incredible that there are so few in such a heavily populated area. Second, it states that many of those trainers got their "certification" on-line. Now I believe in on-line training, but not for the initial trainer certification. For the refresher training, assuming that the candidate has been actively teaching, ok. And on-line 10 and 30 hour classes should only be used when hands-on classes are unavailable. There is just something missing without the classroom back-and-forth between the instructor and attendees and between the attendees themselves.

Shame on any instructor that would short-change workers on safety training. We're not talking about getting out 15 or 20 minutes early here. I don't know about you, but I take safety training very seriously and this type of malfeasance gives us all a black eye.