Originally Posted by: Wailes900134

Would there be a specific body for the education and training fraternity?

IOSH have done a lot lately to improve the 'competence' level in the grading system. However there has been no real work done on approving trainers, beyond their IOSH grade which is based on their abilities as a practitioner.

There has always been a belief in our profession that a qualified H&S advisor is also, by achieving a practitioner qualification, a 'competent' H&S trainer. In my experience this is rarely the case.

I have spent many years as both a practitioner and trainer, and they are very different disciplines. One company I worked for had a team of H&S advisors who were expected to deliver the full portfolio of H&S training to managers and staff. However no one knew what a training needs analysis was, there were no lesson plans and no clear learning aims and objectives. A poor trainer is worse than no training!

This is why I think that IOSH should spend some time at looking at encouraging their members, as part of their grade progression, should also be assessed on the abilities as trainers and that those who decide to go down the training provider route should be recognised by their professional body. 

There is the other side of the coin. Trainers who think that they can read a code of regulations and provide effective training with little, if any, experience of the topic. This means that they may find it very difficult to provide useful answers when someone they are training asks a question about real life scenarios. P

Originally Posted by: O'Donnell54548

confusing trainers with tutors, a common misconception and evidence of the point I am making with regards to practitioners and those who provide training.

Over the length of this thread there appears to be some confusion for sure (and i'm not exempting myself from that). It appears a recurring challenge though is where we fit those who are pretty much totally in the tutor situation (where it would make sense that a professional body of "educators" define their competence to educate rather than the owners of any given syllabus) but they solely provide ISL products and are therefore shackled by the historic IOSH membership rule.

Edited by user 18 January 2021 23:23:58(UTC)  | Reason: Typo

O'Donnell - point well made, but this thread is in the "Career Forum", so it was easy to think about classroom type teaching, or tutoring for e.g an NVQ or NCRQ for the development of an HSE professional.

For what it's worth, I was spared NEBOSH, instead doing a Diploma at Aston Uni. The Professor is on record on the internet as recognising that his attempt to get his students to work out structural engineering equations from first principles was never likely to work. 

So, I needed to know that a bent scaffold tube used as a "standard" i.e upright is dangerous. END OF. I really didn't need to know what the reduction in safe working load was if there was a 10 degree bend in it. A few years later, a TRAINER (who did TUTOR us) showed me how it was very easy to simply replace that damaged standard. Also pointed out the very useful information that if I stood back from the scaffold and the standard didn't look vertical then it was outside the tolerance permitted by the relevant British Standard - no need to get out instrumention - the human eye was quite sufficient to make the determination.

O'Donnell

My point was the Professor was dealing in academia. The trainer dealt with practicalities.

The Professor could have calculated the reduction in Safe Working Load if the standard was 5, 10 or 20 degrees from the vertical.

From the trainer's perspective this would be completely irrelevant. If you could stand back and see that the standard didn't LOOK vertical it was not acceptable and needed to be supplemented and then removed.

In practice, if the scaffold was big enough to have say 50 standards on an elevation, having one somewhere in the middle that was 5, 10 or 20 degrees from the vertical would not be liable to result in scaffold collapse. [The chance of a substantial scaffold collapsing due to a single defect would be extremely remote]. But anyone doing an inspection of said scaffold should have been saying "Sort it".

"Sorting it" was so simple that nobody would start arguing about what was "reasonably practicable".

A different time, money and effort equation to e.g. deciding that a tunnel guard on a machine was not such as to prevent finger access to the danger points and thence needed to be altered in one or more dimensions. 

O'Donnell

If you like, but particularly if you read my comment in the context of what I wrote six days ago.

"Trainers who think that they can read a code of regulations and provide effective training with little, if any, experience of the topic. This means that they may find it very difficult to provide useful answers when someone they are training asks a question about real life scenarios".

You could replace the word "training" with "tutoring". But in terms of getting e.g. European Qualifications Framework certification that tutoring is called training.

That's a very sweeping assumption and it is NOT my opinion.

There are very few experts in a subject, who "truly understand a subject" who can "explain [the entirety of] it, in simple terms, to another" unless that "another" is already well up their learning curve on that particular subject.

What we can hope for is for those who teach/tutor to have sufficient understanding as to be able to "explain" the subject broadly "in simple terms, to another". 

However, there are also those who make a living from training people in subjects where they have little experience.