Environmental, health, and safety (EHS) is critical training designed to protect the safety of workers and the environment. However, delivering EHS training in power plants presents unique challenges, particularly when budgets and deadlines come into play. How do you balance the needs of the organization with those of your learners while fulfilling compliance requirements? If your organization is struggling to meet its EHS training standards, eLearning could be the answer. As a learning methodology, eLearning is flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and ideally suited to energy industry training.
Top Training Challenges in the Energy Industry
1: Balancing Mandatory Training with Competing Priorities
There are dozens of EHS topics to cover. On the worker safety side, you have personal protective gear (PPE), lockout/tagout, confined spaces, ladder safety, hazardous materials handling, ergonomics training—and that’s just scratching the surface. Add in the vast amounts of local, state, federal, OHSA, NERC, and EPA requirements, and the amount of material can become overwhelming. The primary challenge then becomes: how do you deliver these EHS topics to an entire industrial workforce while maintaining productivity?
One of eLearning’s greatest strengths is its accessibility. Unlike instructor-led sessions, which offer training in scheduled, intensive blocks, eLearning can be accessed during the normal flow of work. This means that topics can be divided into shorter lessons and distributed over time, making it easy to cover all necessary topics and deliver them at scale. eLearning can also be used to create individualized learning paths. Administrators can assign special courses to specific workers whose roles require them, enabling organizations to target specific skills gaps.
2: Prioritizing Knowledge Retention
With EHS training, it isn’t enough to simply deliver the learning; workers must also understand why actions are performed in a particular way and retain that critical knowledge. An employee who understands the principles behind the procedures will be far more adept at anticipating issues, troubleshooting, and dealing with ambiguity in their day-to-day tasks.
With eLearning, critical knowledge can be divided into short, easily digestible lessons. This microlearning approach improves learner retention by not overwhelming learners with too much information and by building critical knowledge in a sustainable way.
This approach also allows administrators to deliver task-specific courses to workers at strategic times. Suppose an employee requires confined spaces training but won’t use those skills until six months into the job. With eLearning, it’s easier to schedule that training for a later date, providing critical knowledge when it’s most needed.
Incorporating learning scenarios into your eLearning is another effective way to boost retention rates. Scenario-based learning leverages the power of storytelling to create realistic situations that allow learners to explore ambiguous situations in a virtual environment. This is especially valuable for EHS processes where a wrong decision could have very serious consequences for the worker, the organization, and the environment.
3: Managing EHS Training Costs
EHS training is often delivered in multiday live training sessions. While this approach satisfies annual training requirements in a brief time, it requires an investment of resources to achieve. First, there are the obvious overhead costs of hiring and transporting a facilitator to your destination. Training groups of people at once also means taking people away from their work, which may require additional overtime pay to cover those shifts.
Incorporating eLearning into your organization is less expensive than hosting large in-person training sessions. The lessons can be worked into a power plant’s regular flow of work, which mitigates the costs often associated with live in-person training sessions.
4: Scheduling EHS Training
Determining precisely when to deliver EHS training can be difficult. Pulling employees from their work for classroom training sessions can be a logistical challenge. How do you find the time to deliver the necessary training to your entire workforce while covering shifts or taking technicians off their tools to maintain productivity?
Online technical training offers a more flexible option. By building brief learning periods into an employee’s regular shift schedule, you eliminate the hassle of taking groups of workers off the floor for long periods in favor of sustained short-term training.
5: Updating EHS Training Content
For organizations that have their own learning and development (L&D) team, creating new content is only part of the equation. It’s also critical to maintain and update your existing courses to ensure all learning is current. EHS standards are constantly evolving. Staying compliant means regularly revising your curriculum to reflect any changes to regulatory requirements, internal policies, and training best practices, as well as removing content once it becomes outdated.
Some organizations can handle this internally, but for other companies, it can pose a serious challenge. If you lack the resources to both produce and maintain EHS content, it might be wise to bring in a partner. A good L&D company will not only help you stay compliant but will use analytics to highlight which areas of your training are most effective in driving positive business outcomes. Those insights can identify which areas to prioritize in subsequent lessons.
An L&D partner can also help you assess the contents of your library and identify gaps in your learning materials. If you have too much content to assess manually, there are AI-powered solutions that can quickly rationalize your material, making it easy to tag, organize, analyze, and update at scale.
eLearning’s Flexible Training Solutions for Any Organization
eLearning is not only time- and cost-effective, but it also offers flexible options that encompass the full spectrum of EHS training needs. Does your company require a specialized EHS solution? Custom eLearning content can be tailored to your specific training needs. Are you looking for existing material that can be delivered quickly? Off-the-shelf eLearning courses are a great option for tight budgets and timelines. Whether you plan to create content on your own or prefer partnering with an L&D provider, there is an eLearning solution for every organization.
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