Aerial Lift Safety Through Training: 10 Best Practices For Employers

Aerial lifts are sometimes necessary for construction, maintenance, and other responsibilities. They’re incredibly useful pieces of machinery, but they can also be dangerous. Proper training and education can make them much safer for both operators and the people around them.

But what are the best practices for ensuring better training and education in this area?

How to Improve Your Aerial Lift Safety Training

Aerial lift safety training can be improved in several ways:

1. Adopt consistent standards:

Your training is going to be much more effective if you adopt consistent standards. In other words, whatever you teach to one employee, you should teach to all your employees. If you treat something as a safety violation in one context, treat it as a safety violation in other contexts. The more consistent you are, the clearer your standards are going to be and the more quickly your employees are going to learn. This is also going to lead to much more consistent implementation of your safety standards.

2. Document your process:

Next, document your process. The easiest way to do this is to work with a third party that already has an aerial lift safety training process fully fleshed out. However, if you choose to do all your training in-house, you can also create a system of documentation for yourself. What are the modules that employees need to go through? What is the process that they need to follow? How are they going to be evaluated at the end?

3. Consider online training:

Online learning can be highly beneficial. It allows you to educate and train your employees in many different ways, and affords both you and them more flexibility in pursuing your safety training goals. Employees will have the option of learning remotely in most cases, and they can usually learn at their own pace. Online training isn’t a perfect fit for every employee or every employer, but it’s worth considering at the very least.

4. Hire better trainers/educators:

Even if you pursue remote online training, it’s a good idea to hire trainers and educators to support employees in achieving their safety training goals. Some educators and trainers are objectively better than others, catering to different learning styles and mastering the art of communication. The better these staff members are, the easier it will be for your employees to learn.

5. Make safety the top priority:

Aerial lift training typically includes aspects of how to use the equipment and how to stay productive, but safety should always be the top priority. Make sure the safety aspect is integrated into each learning module.

6. Explore a wide range of aerial lifts:

It’s a good idea to get employees acquainted with a wide range of different types of aerial lifts, including scissor lifts and cherry pickers. Even if you don’t use this type of equipment regularly, it can give employees a broader perspective on how to put their new knowledge to good use.

7. Provide opportunities to ask questions:

Make sure that all your trainees have the opportunity to ask questions. Learning is often best implemented as a two-way process, with meaningful dialogue and feedback between participants.

8. Facilitate microlearning:

Microlearning is a set of strategies and practices designed to maximize learning and retention by resisting learning fatigue in the learner. As the name suggests, this philosophy encourages learning in small chunks for short stretches of time. Your employees are more likely to learn and retain information related to aerial lift safety if you break things down into tiny chunks.

9. Ensure your culture prioritizes safety:

Your workplace culture should prioritize safety. If your employees take safety seriously and understand that it’s the top priority in their working environment, they’ll be much more likely to take your aerial lift safety training seriously. They’ll also be much more likely to implement it in the practical workplace environment.

10. Get employee feedback

Finally, make sure you collect some employee feedback. At the end of your aerial lift training and certification process, ask employees for any suggestions they have on how to improve the process in the future. This is often an effective way to glean meaningful insights you can use to polish the process further.

Perfecting the Art of Aerial Lift Safety Training

When it comes to aerial lift safety training, your procedures and curricula are never going to be perfect. But striving for that perfection will allow you to make continuous improvements, ultimately increasing safety, productivity, and efficiency within your organization simultaneously. As you learn more about how your employees respond to aerial lift safety training and as you incorporate novel strategies into your curricula, maintain a mindset of ongoing improvement and evolution.