How Can You Better Qualify Your Workers to Be Electrically Safe

The way you think about safety matters. 

 

In the workplace, safety can be hard to achieve if the aim is minimum compliance.

Deciding how much risk is acceptable isn’t a good starting point. 

To start doing it better, qualifying should aim for quality rather than just fulfilling minimal requirements.

This blog is about how you can better qualify your workers.

 

 

How do you qualify workers? 
 

An employer has a responsibility for their employees’ safety. 

Part of that responsibility is setting the safety standard for how things are done and qualifying people to do them. 

In the workplace this means establishing, documenting and implementing safety-related work practices and procedures. There are lots of requirements and recommended methods in workplace safety standards. Making these your own for your site is the hard part. This will be all the technical details of your electrical safety program. 

For an overview and to get started, Electrical Safety Programs - How to Create, Implement & Manage (leafelectricalsafety.com)

This is followed by the required training and a record that workers are task-qualified.

NOTE: All workers, even non-electrical ones, who are exposed to electrical hazards and risks need to receive training in safety-related work practices and procedures and be trained to identify and understand how electrical hazards can injure them.  

 
How do you qualify electrical workers? 

For their safety-related tasks, everyone in a workplace needs to be ‘task-qualified’ by their employer’s standard. However, some electrical tasks have laws that set the minimum standards an employer can set to qualify someone. In electrical safety this is a qualified person or qualified electrical worker. 

Qualified person (worker) — one who has both:

•    demonstrated skills and knowledge related to
•    the construction and operation of electrical equipment and installations and has
•    received safety training to identify the hazards and reduce the associated risk.

For more how to think about these requirements, How to Become a Qualified Electrical Worker? 2023 (leafelectricalsafety.com)

This means as an electrician, even if you are qualified for some electrical tasks by your employer, you may be unqualified to do a task that remained undemonstrated.

The purpose of “qualifying” training is to make sure the worker will understand the equipment operation, interaction, when and how a hazardous situation could happen, and how to control the risks. 

 
What is electrical safety training? 

There are a lot of parts to electrical safety training, 

For more on what’s covered, Arc Flash Training | Topics the Arc Flash Protection Training Needs to Cover (leafelectricalsafety.com)

As an example, one of the most important parts when training electrical workers is having them demonstrate the skills and knowledge to conduct a risk assessment. Workers must demonstrate:

Decision-making process necessary to be able to do the following: 

1) perform the job safety planning; 
2) identify electrical hazards; 
3) assess the associated risk; and 
4) select the appropriate risk control methods from the hierarchy of controls, including selecting the PPE. 

 

How often do you need electrical safety training? 

The minimum is every three years, but a lot can change in that time so there are lots of situations that isn’t enough.  

For more on how often you need it, Arc Flash Training Frequency and Requirements (leafelectricalsafety.com)

Decision making in risk assessment is a topic that likely needs extra attention. Even after you understand the basics of job planning and risk assessment, how do you apply factors involving human error, normal equipment condition, and an understanding of the hierarchy of controls. These are factors that can increase the risk of a job, but are difficult to train. 

 
How can you train better?  

Supervisors need to do field audits to make sure safe work practices are being followed. This is often one of the toughest parts of an electrical safety program because it takes time, safety expertise, and leadership. Regular safety training should make this easier, but traditional classroom training often fails to engage workers or teach them the decision-making skills they need.

As a result, there are follow-up discussions after training, to deal with real-world situations, showing a gap between knowing safety practices and applying them on the job.

To close this gap, workers need to develop their own thinking and practice making safety decisions.

Many trainers use stories to help workers connect with the material, but immersive training goes further. It offers realistic scenarios with consequences, helping workers experience difficult decisions, learn from them, and improve their overall safety.

Here is part of our method to make training better, Immersive Electrical Safety Training (leafelectricalsafety.com)    

 
How do you document electrical safety training? 

An employer needs to keep records proving that each worker has completed the required training.

These records should: 
•    be created when the worker demonstrates proficiency in the work practices; 
•    be kept for the entire time the worker is employed; and 
•    include details of the training, the worker's name, and the training dates.

A worker doing on-the-job training to gain the skills and knowledge to become qualified can be considered qualified for specific tasks if they can perform those tasks safely at their training level, once they are directly supervised by a qualified person in those tasks. This would also then need to be recorded. 

Field Work Audit - Even if nothing has changed and electrical safety training is only required every three years, each worker also needs to be observed through regular supervision or inspection at least once a year, to demonstrate their use a safety-related work practices.  

 
What is an electrical training program?

You may find that you have an electrical safety program, but are having trouble making sense of the gaps between what your employees know and what they need to know. 
Type of training - The type and extent of the training provided shall be determined in accordance with the risk to the worker. -CSA Z462

This means you may need to establish, document and implement an electrical training program. The more extensive a training program the better qualified the workers. 

If you’ve made to this point you’re almost to the end, this is the final piece of the training puzzle and worth the effort! 

To start finding the gaps, do a Needs Assessment, a Job/Task Analysis and a Job Hazard Analysis. These will look at what skills your workers have and what skills they need to safely do all the jobs required. 
 
 

Needs Assessment – Who needs what training? 

Before you can really get into how to better qualify electrical workers, you need to understand what their skills and what your needs are. 

For a given job type, gather all personnel who may be aware of the specific job requirements and have the knowledge of all the codes, standards and regulations for the job being evaluated. 

Other factors that may help determine the training program requirements could be the quality of existing procedures, human performance factors, management style, and the work environment conditions. 

To determine what training workers need, follow these steps:

•    Assess the current skill levels of employees.
•    Identify skill or knowledge gaps within the company.
•    Identify any new skills or knowledge required.
•    Decide on the training necessary to fill those gaps.
 

Job/Task Analysis – What tasks are included in a job? 

By laying out all the tasks involved in a job, you can identify which ones might need more training. Breaking the job down into specific tasks also makes it easier to assign different workers to handle parts of the job that require different levels of expertise or knowledge.

1.    Review job information: Look at existing procedures, standards, reports, and any other relevant info to understand the general requirements of each task.
2.    Create job descriptions: Develop job descriptions for everyone involved. The most challenging part of this is building a detailed task inventory, which includes every measurable and observable task that makes up the job.
3.    Organize tasks: Categorize tasks into groups, duty areas, or specific functions. These tasks, grouped together by work area or duties, define the job.
4.    Identify training needs: Pinpoint the tasks that will require special training or a more in-depth analysis.

 

 

Job Hazard Analysis – What are the hazards in a job? 

Once you've broken a job into tasks, you can assess the risks involved in each one. This lets you perform a thorough risk assessment and develop a job safety plan, helping you identify the skills and knowledge needed to do the job safely and effectively.

1.    Select jobs and tasks for analysis: Prioritize them based on the type of work and the potential hazards each task involves.
2.    Review work conditions: Before starting the analysis, assess the conditions under which the job will be performed and create a checklist.
3.    Break down the job into steps: Most jobs can be split into a series of elements or steps that you can then examine for hazards.
4.    Record and examine hazards: Once the steps are broken down, record them and look for any potential hazards, either current or that could occur in the future.
5.    Identify the cause of hazards: Determine the most likely cause(s) of each hazard.
6.    Assign risk controls: Using the hierarchy of controls go through options starting with the most effective, Elimination, Substitution, Engineered, Administrative.  
7.    Establish safe work practices: Identify appropriate work procedures and the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) for each hazard.
8.    Update your Job/Task Analysis: Based on the hazards you've identified, revise the Job/Task Analysis as needed.
 
 
 
Bringing it all together

Once you have completed these three steps, you’ll be exhausted and likely have more questions.  

Getting people to do safety training is hard, is doing it better any easier? 

It’s more work, but when workers are learning exactly what they know they need to know it will feel easier to them!  

Of course it is safer too, but even if you’re already meeting your requirements, keep making it better because if the system makes sense, being safe is easier. 

Chat with us or look for more answers take a look here, Free Definitive Guide: Electrical Safety eLearning & Training Guide (leafelectricalsafety.com)