Institute of Work Health and Safety / Systems

Training that changes behaviour and training that produces a certificate

Both have their place. Confusing them is expensive.

A great deal of safety training exists to produce a record that training occurred, and everybody involved knows it. The annual refresher delivered as a slide deck to a room of people who have done it four times before is not primarily an attempt to change behaviour, and treating it as one leads to a puzzled search for why behaviour did not change.

That is not an argument against it. Some records are required, and a competent organisation produces them efficiently rather than pretending they are something else. The mistake is spending the entire training budget on the compliance layer and concluding that training does not work.

Training that does change behaviour tends to share features: it is specific to the actual task rather than the general hazard, it is delivered close to where the work happens, it involves doing rather than watching, and it is delivered by somebody the workforce regards as credible about that work. All four are more expensive than a slide deck.

The practical approach is to be honest internally about which category any given session belongs to, and to resist the pressure to justify the compliance layer in terms of outcomes it was never designed to produce.

One practical distinction helps with the budget argument. Training that must be current on a particular date for a regulatory or contractual reason is a compliance cost and should be delivered as efficiently as it can be. Training intended to change how a task is performed is an investment and should be resourced accordingly. Organisations that hold a single training budget covering both consistently spend it on the first, because the first has a deadline attached and the second does not.