This is part 2 in a 2-part series on electrical safety training. Find part 1 here.
The instructor in an NFPA 70E electrical safety training course must present the material with passion. This means they possess the ability to convince personnel of the importance and necessity of the need for the change in safety culture 70E requires, but also they mus possess the ability to convert a resistant trainee.
Implementing NFPA 70E will mean presenting to electrical trades and maintenance personnel new procedures and PPE standards that will change the way these people have worked for years. It’s more than the tangible differences in workplace protocol; it is a change in a company’s culture. That’s huge, and breeds a predictable resistance among some, particularly the more experienced. The instructor must have the ability to recognize when this is happening, know how to handle the situation, and have the passion to confront the individuals and the experience to back it up.
The instructor must be credible: He or she must have at some point worn a tool belt, been in the field, or been in maintenance or in the electrical trades. It really helps if they have some scars from that experience.
The difficulty of achieving culture change is never overstated. The effort involves approaching a group of people who are already the highest-paid hourly employees at your facility, and telling them they need additional training. It won’t always be an easy sell. They’ve worked long and hard to learn this trade. You can’t just send them a memo saying things are different now and they have to change the way they’ve been working for years.
Some electricians have gone so far as to take a stand against 70E. You may have witnessed them sticking out their chest with macho bravado saying something like, “I’ve been doing electrical work for 25 years and I’m not dead yet,” or, “Any good electrician with enough experience knows how to stay out of it and not get hurt.”
This kind of person is not just naive, they’re dangerous. They are a member of a demographic most likely to be killed by an electrical hazard. Again, it takes a passionate instructor to lead a class with this type of individual present.
It takes experience to know just what should be included in the training as well. The topics on which qualified personnel are to be trained are listed in 70E and in the OSHA regulations. However, simply using these as “check-off” lists will leave your training incomplete. For example, one of the requirements is that the qualified person be able to determine nominal voltage. Fifteen minutes of instruction on reading a volt meter is a far cry from what is needed in this case.
There are many diverse electrical distribution systems in industry and your staff needs trained on the specific system or systems employed at your facility. They need to know what the voltage should be phase to phase and phase to ground and where and how to measure it. They need to know that your facility may have many different types of systems. They need to know how to determine which equipment is more likely to be interlocked with other equipment and how to properly verify voltage for lockout tagout purposes and how to isolate it. It’s much more in-depth than learning to read your meter.
That type of thorough instruction is only delivered by instructors who are passionate about the subject matter. A passion for training yields attentive trainees, which yields safer personnel, which yields a more productive workforce.
