How To Improve Safety Training

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with safety, training and development consultant Cameron Hacault, CEO of Haland Learning, who directs the design and implementation of safety courses and instructor training.

Cameron is on a mission to make safety training NOT suck, and he shares expert advice to help HSE professionals deliver effective learning that’s practical, understandable, and applicable.

The purpose of training should always be co-worker safety, and Cameron explains why it should never be driven by organizations wanting to cover themselves in the event of accidents. Therefore, it’s no surprise he urges HSE professionals to focus on the learners when designing safety training.

Cameron strongly believes that training needs to be based on dialogue, not monologue and gives guidance on how to avoid “shoveling safety at people”’ and treating them like ‘inanimate objects’.

He gives many practical tips on making learning sessions more engaging and explains why questions and curiosity are crucial components to delivering effective safety messages.

Every element of safety training is covered: the importance of the learning environment, online course, trainer competencies and common pitfalls. Cameron’s interview is exactly like his courses - highly practical, easily understandable, and totally applicable.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Today's guest wants to help the safety industry evolve in its understanding of what training is, why we do it, and how to make it effective.

His expertise is not just in training, but in training the trainers. We'll talk about how you can know whether a training session will be effective, what you should look for if you're hiring an external trainer, and how you can improve your own training skills. Cameron Hacault is the CEO of Haland Learning, where he directs the design and implementation of safety courses, as well as instructor training and facilitation.

In 17 years of working in the safety training field, he's developed curricula for organizations from diverse industries, such as retail grocers, school districts, and the roofing industry. He's worked as a trainer and a consultant in a wide variety of safety instruction topics, such as auditor training, fall protection, e-learning development, and leadership training.

Cam teaches coaches and mentors instructors to enhance the retention and engagement of adult learners. He joins us from Langley, BC, British Columbia, sorry, international audience. He joins us from Langley, British Columbia. Welcome.

- [Cameron] All right. Thanks. Appreciate it.

- Can you tell me a little bit about your journey in safety and how you decided to embrace training and build your expertise there?

- Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about safety and then go to training. So, I ended up getting into safety because I was a first aid attendant on a construction site years ago. And in my evenings, I was studying to get a degree in psychology. I only did one course then stopped, but that one course was fascinating and I learned about behavioral conditioning.

So, I wanted to try some behavioral conditioning on our workers to get them to work safer. And the safety manager of the company thought I was a weirdo and doing this type of stuff was stupid. So, eventually, he left and I got promoted to his position, and I was fascinated about how to modify human behavior and get people to want to do the safe things because I didn't believe in just scaring people to do the right stuff.

And so I've always been driven to figure out why people do things and help them do things the right way because I care about them. And then sort of how that connected to training is a long time ago, I used to teach first aid in the Navy as one of my side jobs. And I loved doing it. The first year was tough because I was a 19-year-old kid teaching a bunch of really hostile older workers that knew everything.

And so I cut my teeth in these challenging environments of how to teach adults and get the respect of the room and all of that stuff. And I had an aptitude for it. So, when I got into safety, part of my work was delivering job site safety training, and then more formally, you know, hazard recognition training, fall protection training, and so on.

And I just loved engaging with the tradespeople where I'm just a guy, I don't have any sort of...I relate really well to just regular people. I'd rather be with a group of tradespeople than in a room with a bunch of people wearing suits and leather shoes that have pointed toes. And so because I do that when I train people, I just talk to them in their plain language and it's fun.

Getting people that, you know, are family men and family women that just want to go home and have a good time in the summer and, you know, get a few beer. They're often in a safety class because they were voluntold to be there. It's pretty rare that someone says, "Man, I can't wait to do some safety training next week. I'm going to take a day off work and pay for it myself." Like, that doesn't happen.

So, when I have people come in the room and they're all just told to be there, to have them leave at the end of the day going, man, that was awesome. Like, I'm totally going to reshape how I look at work, it's great. So, finding out how to solve that puzzle of personalities at this one.

- Great. So you've been in training for a long time. And from a conversation we had earlier, I knew I could tell that excellent training is really important to you. One of the things that came out was that you see issues with the way safety training is often delivered. Not always, but often.

You talked about some instructors offering, and this is a quote, "A sliver of diligence with a big slice of negligence," which I thought was just really a nice turn of phrase, but can you expand a little bit about what you mean and then let us know how big is this problem?

- Yeah. It is. Man, it gets me so frustrated because, you know, one of the things, and I think a lot of us can relate to this, whether we can think back to a time when we were teenagers or if we have teenagers or kids, if a parent gives an instruction to their kids, says, "Hey, can you grab the dishes?"

And the kid doesn't do anything, but they also don't say anything, the parent might say, hey, can you grab the dishes, a bit louder and the kid doesn't say anything. Then eventually, the question is, "Did you hear me?" And the problem there that we all know and feel in our gut, aside from being frustrated, is that communication is going one way.

And, you know, in the military, what we learn about is two-way communication or closed-loop communication. So, when you're on the radio talking to a fellow warship about engaging an enemy, you don't just say, "Hey, tango alpha. This is Victor tango. Over."' And they just sit there and go, "Yeah, I'm sure he knows that we heard him." Like, there has to be this two-way street, and so often training is just that one-way thing where we're shoveling content or we're shoveling safety at people, and we're treating them as inanimate objects that our job is to have money come in because of people being in the class.

And as long as they sit there and they don't fall asleep or sleep too much, and they check the boxes at the end of the day, then we're good. We're safe and we're diligent. And the last part is there's so much talk around, well, at least we've covered ourselves legally if something goes wrong. And that effing pisses me off so much when people talk about if something goes wrong, I'm covered.

And it's because that something shouldn't go wrong in the first place. And if we're planning for people to die of how we're going to make ourselves look good, then we are totally screwed. The plan for me, when I work all day, when I go to bed at night, is in my gut, how do I know that the people I work with today are going to go home at the end of the day?

And how can I support that happening? Covering my ass is the last of my concerns because I'm trying to cover their ass. So, long story short, communication and training is often pushed at people and they're treated like inanimate objects, and we don't do that. Had to wrap it up.

Otherwise I would have just gone on all day.

- No, it's fine. I mean, it comes down to caring, right? Whether you care about people or whether you care about, as you said, how you look if things go wrong. So, you've done hundreds of training, direct training sessions, but you also train people to be trainers. Is there any difference between teaching sort of future trainers versus teaching students like direct safety skills?

- Yes. Certainly.

- Not that training isn't a direct safety skill, but you know what I mean. Teaching teaching as opposed to teaching a specific skill.

- It certainly is. It's different in that it's the same, like you're working with a group of people, but it's sort of you're teaching a topic on top of a topic. So, it's a bit meta, I guess, you know? And then people say, "Well, who trains the trainer that trains trainers?" And it's like this chain that never ends. So, it's different that way.

It's also different, you know, now that I think about it, it's pretty uncommon that an instructor candidate comes into the program where they were told they had to be there. So, there's one thing right off the bat is in I'd say 80% of cases, the students aren't only wanting to be there, they're excited. Like, they want to grow their career. They want to open up options in their career, but they also want to get past their regular day-to-day.

They want to learn something new. So that makes a huge difference. The other focus though, is that when we're teaching a safety class to end users, we're teaching them how to think about their day, whereas when we're teaching an instructor class to instructor candidates, we're teaching instructors how to think about their students, not how to think about themselves. So, one of the concepts we get across to the instructors is the sooner you can stop caring about yourself as something special, the better you'll be.

Because your job isn't to look good or be cool, your job is to help people go home. And the sooner you can get over yourself, the better, right? If my fly's undone, okay, I'll pull it back up. It's not like I'm going to leave the day and go, "Oh my God, this class is over." Like, it's just part of it, right?

- Yeah. And we're going to get into more specifics about your ideas about training, design, and delivery and that kind of stuff too, but first I have a couple more questions. Most safety professionals have given some kind of employee training, whether it's safety onboarding, toolbox talks, something, so those are kind of obvious instructional roles. In your experience, are there areas of safety work in which safety professionals, they don't typically see themselves as instructors, but you think that it might help to approach that work with a teaching frame of mind?

- That's a great question. When you said initially that they find themselves in these situations where they're teaching, and I think you said as though they thought it was obvious, and that's the first part is often I don't think they do. So, safety, you know, professionals, the most common way they might find themselves in that situation is if they're...in the construction industry, they might find themselves at a job site in the morning.

And there's, let's say, 50 workers and they're all kind of standing around a big circle, like getting ready to start the day. And the safety person, or sometimes the superintendent has to lead the morning toolbox talk. Excuse me. And it might range in time from five minutes to half an hour. And that is 100% a training session. And in my mind, training is really just a fancy way of saying two-way communication.

Doesn't really matter what topic is, in this context at least. So, the people leading these toolbox talks have I think the most impact on our day-to-day level of awareness for workers and probably the least utilized because when we talk about people pushing information at others, like instructors do, that's what they do with those toolbox talks.

And taking the frame of reference of like, how can we design this toolbox talk in a way that engages the people in it rather than treating them as inanimate objects? How can we ask them good questions to stimulate thinking? How can we see that they've learned or got value from this? How can we leverage the people in the space that have experience rather than talk at them like they're stupid when they've done this for longer than I've been alive?

Those are things I think that would be amazing for any safety professional or professional to think about when they go in to work with a group of people rather than just, you know, pick up a piece of paper and read at them for 10 minutes and then finish up with many questions and there's never any questions.

- Nope. Okay. Bye.

- Yeah, that's great. We just want to go [inaudible].

- Okay. So, when you think about safety training, you divide it into two kind of large areas. There's design and delivery. So, I'd like to talk about both, but let's start with design, and then folks, I'm looking at sort of a tree that Cam has given me ahead of time. So, design also divides into two large areas, which is designing the process and designing the materials.

So, I think a lot of discussion about course design tends to focus on designing course materials rather than on designing the process. Is that a fair observation?

- Yes. You nailed it.

- Okay. Yeah. Just oh, let's make a good PowerPoint not...

- Yep. That's right.

- Yeah. Okay. So, you look at different elements of the design process and I wanted to highlight a few of them and just sort of ask you about them and let you speak to them. So, one of them is stakeholder analysis. Can you explain what you mean by that?

- Yeah. So, when we're building courses, the most important person in this whole thing is the person that's going to take it. Regardless of who's paying for it, if a client is paying me to design a custom course, sure they're paying for it, but really it's their workers that I need to consider as the most important person. So, the way that I talk, the way that I read, the way that I interact with information isn't the way that everybody else does.

And if I'm teaching a course that might have to be delivered to, let's say, primarily laborers that are somewhere between 20 and 40 years old with a low literacy level who work in the field all the time, then planning an entire day of highly technical training where they're sitting in a classroom and they have to memorize long passages of words and regulatory references and all this stuff, it's going to be a bad thing.

So, I have to start is who's going to be in the room and how could this learning be designed for that person. And sort of what's going to work for them. Are there other stakeholders? Like, would you consider...in that situation where you know, someone is paying for you to design the course, they might not be sort of the most important stakeholder, but would you consider them a stakeholder as well?

- Certainly, yeah. I kind of just ignore that. Unfortunately, I just don't really care about anybody else except for the students. But you know, there's the client or the industry association, there's maybe CSA or other standards that might apply. There's safety regulation. There's industry best practices.

There's a number of things we have to consider. So, right now, we're in the middle of building a few different courses and we'll create our course design, and then we'll contrast that with what the standards require and we'll contrast that with what's done in industry. And we'll put all these different filters on top and see what comes out the bottom.

- Okay. So, another element in the process is alignment and the various activities that lead to alignment. So, who's aligning with whom and how is that accomplished?

- Sure. Yeah. And the term alignment, like, I don't know if...it is probably not commonly understood, but a course design is not necessarily aligning whom with whom, it's more that we're aligning what we see at the beginning of the course, to the course experience, to what happens at the end of the course. So if we say in this course we're going to learn 3 things, and in the course they learn 10 things, and at the end of the course, we test them on one thing, that's a very misaligned course.

So, our job when we're doing this to make sure that we've got a clear goal of what we want to have happen for these people. Like, what would be the benefit of them taking this training? And then from there, we basically go through this painful process of identifying all of the objectives that we want them to sort of know or be able to do. And then all of the course content and learning activities have to mesh up or match up with all of those objectives.

And at the end, we have to do our assessment to make sure that all of these objectives can be assessed in a way that aligns, I guess, with how the course was taught.

- Okay. So it's like, it's one part consistency of structure, but it's also kind of consistency of purpose, I guess.

- Yeah, that's right.

- You start out with your goals and you make sure that everything's supporting that.

- Yes. And that's, yeah, I'd say painful because it is pretty arduous, especially when you get into, you know, big courses. We've got a five-day course of working on and, you know, it's going to be a lot of work, but they're worth it. Yeah.

- Yeah. So, you also mention in the process testing, editing, and repeating. So, would you say that in a sense that course design work is ever done?

- No, it shouldn't be. I was in a course recently and the instructor acknowledged that what we were covering and what was on the slide was different than what was in our workbook. Because in our workbook, the training agency had made so many copies that they just needed to get through the rest of the copies. Yeah.

And that just made me sad because like, here we are suffering because the company saved, I don't know, 1,000 or whatever amount of money they saved. And yeah, like for example, in one of our courses, it has to change at least every year or two because what's happening in the world changes. We've got different incidents occurring. With working from heights program, two years ago, people...the deaths from ladders was at 27%, but now it's at 45%.

So, our course, I think it has to move with the times and focus where the focus is needed, so we're going to be doing a bit more ladder training as part of this course because that's why people are dying. Yeah. So, it should be sort of a fluid thing as much as it can be.

- Okay. So, let's get to materials. Where do you think, other than what we already mentioned, which is focusing on the materials to the exclusion of looking at process, where do you think many instructors go wrong when it comes to learning materials, or where are a few places they might go wrong?

- Well, sometimes...and it's not meant to...I don't ever want to say, like, I think instructors are bad or doing the wrong things. You know, we're all just people trying to do our job. And one of the reasons I started this company is because I got frustrated at being an instructor that stuck with materials that someone else gives me. Because, you know, if you have bad materials and you're a great trainer, you can create a good training experience, but if you have great materials and you're a great trainer, so much better.

So, a lot of instructors, I think, have a lot of potential. They might not have had either the training or the right people to be exposed to or whatever it is to know what's possible to have training, be a good experience for all, and they're stuck with bad materials. And an employer or organization that doesn't think this way, they just think, oh, we got to get the checkboxes done, get all the stuff out there, and get the people trained.

- What are some hallmarks or maybe patterns of things that you would consider bad materials? Like, what does bad look like in this situation? Out of date, you did already mention out of date.

- Yeah. One of them is this would be a bad course, and it doesn't matter what the topic is, but if you see pages of text and there's nothing for people to do there...you know, images are great if needed. But as a student in a class, when I'm looking at this, what I know when I go into a course if I see that book is I'm going to be sitting here all day waiting for the course to be over.

So, wherever statements can be converted into questions is where we have lots of opportunity. Something we talked about yesterday in instructor, of course, we just finished is one of the instructor candidates said, "How can I take all this content and make it so, you know, people are engaging with it?" I was like, just change the period every sentence to turn into a question mark and give people space to think about it.

- Yeah. And so for people who are listening on the podcast alone, what Cameron holding up was essentially a wall of text. Like, it was a page with, you know, instructions and questions of points, but when you look at it, your first impression is just that it's to me, a wall of text, which is something that just doesn't work for communication. We're learning that a lot in digital design.

So that was design. I'd like to move into course delivery now because I think there's something that everyone can learn about how to improve their delivery. I just don't think anyone has reached perfection.

- No, there's no such thing.

- So, talk to me first about the physical instructional space and what effect it has on learning.

- I love that you're asking this because it is such a big effect. So, if I'm getting a call...actually today we had one from a client where they wanted to train nine people. And the first question is, do you want the training on-site or do you want to run it at our training center?

Because if it's at our training center, I know the number of people and how it's going to work for our environment. We set the environment up here to be open, clean, clear, welcoming, spacious, have people have the ability to interact with each other. The seating is probably one of the most important things that when a learning environment is set up with rows of seating, that will create a dramatically different environment than if you have a square or a rectangle or something where people can see each other while we're in class.

Other things like might seem minor, but are important, are the temperature, is room too hot or too cold? Is it too loud? Are you too near traffic or construction? Will that be distracting? Will people have phones ringing in the background? Will you have coffee available?

Is lunch being provided? If not, will they have enough time to get lunch? What's our accessibility to audiovisual equipment? Are people going to be tripping over wires? There's maybe a hundred things you could consider, but to say it's not important would be a huge oversight. And the more information I can have about a proposed space before I get there, the better. So, often I'll require the client to send me at least one picture of the space or a floor plan because some companies will send 20 people into a C-can in the middle of nowhere.

A C-can is basically just a box that you'd see on the back of a semi-truck, like those shipping containers essentially. And cramming a bunch of 20 tradespeople into a C-can for an entire day of training is a lose-lose situation for all involved. So, the space is very important.

- Not comfortable, stuffy, too hot, too cold. So, now the flip side, how does online training, because I know you do or have done some online training, how does that affect instructional space? Obviously, it's a different space. So, what, what do you try and keep in mind when you design online courses?

- That's cool. It's interesting in some ways it's a lot simpler because, you know, in this case, you're at your own place, you've got your background, your environment. If you have tea, great, but if you don't, there's nothing I can do about it. And so I have to worry more about my space than anything else. When I'm designing courses that will or may be delivered by live online like this, often we use Zoom or Teams or something, I do have to think about, how can we ensure that the people, whether it's 2 or 10 or whatever, have something that they can do, and again, interact with the content, those activities, with each other, with me?

And yeah, sometimes it's challenging, but I think it's not...no, let me back up. Actually, I don't find it challenging. I find it fun. So, an example is we had a training course where if it's in person, we had a matching game where I'd cut out basically 40 pieces of paper and people would get up and they'd basically chat with each other and try and find the matching answers together.

And in this case, we had four people in the room with me and then we had two people somewhere else on the same Zoom call with us, like in a big boardroom, and then we had a third person all by themselves like in Fort McMurray or something. And I'm like, "How can I, you know, make it so they're involved?" So, what I did was the night before is I emailed two of the pages to one group and one page to this other person.

And I said before class, I want you to cut out the stuff from these pages. And then I omitted those pages to our in-person group. So, when we did the activity, we all did the same stuff and we're all chatting back and forth and eventually you don't really realize everybody's in different places because we're just interacting and having a good time, but it can be easy to get into the trap of just lecturing. And even right now, I have this alarm bell going off in the back of my head where if I talk for more than a minute, I start being like, oh my god, I need to have people doing something other than just listen to me, but you're specifically asking me to talk at you.

- That's part of the deal. This is how this one works. Okay. So, you have said that the two big instructor competencies are asking questions and answering questions. So, let me ask you this question, why are questions so important?

- I like that. Well, why do you think [inaudible]? Just it's neat.

- You kind of alluded to it before about the closed...the two-way.

- The closed and the loop. Yeah. You know, questions create that opportunity for us to have this cycle of communication or reciprocity between, you know, the facilitator or instructor and everybody else in the room. And if we have good questions, it opens people's minds up and it opens up their egos without you challenging them or fighting with them.

So often, you know, we'll get those rough and tough tradespeople in the room and they know everything, they've been there before, they know all this stuff. And so if I start telling them a bunch of stuff, then, you know, it's going to bounce off them like water off the duck's back. But if I ask questions, you can't argue with a question, you can't tell me I'm a jerk or that I don't know what I'm talking about if I ask you what do you think about this.

So, it totally flips that whole sort of ego and let's open up. And it's more fun. Because curiosity, I think for me that's what drives life is if we're not curious, like what's the point? Like, we're only here for so much time and if we can find new ways to think about things or ways to grow, and if we can find a way to make an eight-hour training course not suck, that's awesome, especially for these people that have taken so many times.

- Yeah. I think they could lead to the difference between a conversation and a lecture, right? Okay. So, you have listed a few pitfalls that instructors sometimes fall into when they're just learning how to teach. Could you summarize what each of these mean and how to avoid them? There's three or there may be more, there's three that I wanted to ask about. So, one you called, it's a race, what does that mean?

- Yeah. So, it's a race is when an instructor asks a question and they get that quiet after the question so then they answer it themselves. And when that happens, the first time it happens, we're telling the students that I don't trust you to answer this question, so I'm going to just take care of myself. And so now we're basically telling the students, put on your seatbelts because we're just in the safety class now.

We get to wash it until the end of the day. And the next time the instructor asks a question, there's going to be silence for even longer this time if the instructor waits because the students are being conditioned to realize that their input isn't actually that important. So, it's a race is a really challenging pitfall to fall into, especially the first 20 minutes of the class. And it's especially hard to avoid as a new instructor because they are so, you know...I get nervous as well with new courses and they're anxious.

And when we're in front of a group of people, if we ask a question and there's just crickets, they start going crazy and like, "Oh my God, I got to say something." And just being comfortable with that quiet. That's okay. No rush.

- Yeah. That's what I was going to say is some people find themselves really just uncomfortable with silence, even in a social situation.

- Yeah, that's right. And silence can be powerful when in those learning environments, and especially the first couple of times you do it, people start to realize, this is all right. You know, and the students relax, like the instructor kind of sets the mood for the class. And if they come in and they're all jittery, everybody just kind of [inaudible 00:28:56] they get all like this. So, you know, talking a bit slower, given a bit of time between questions, and it's like, all right, this is all right.

And now they feel that they can genuinely add value.

- I think it gives people as well more time to think about it because as the instructor, you know the answer, right? So, jumping to it in your head is a super quick process, but for everyone else, hopefully that silence means that they're going, well, it could be this, but maybe it's...you know, they're making connections in their mind.

- That's exactly it.

- Okay. So, the second one is called beat a dead horse. I think most people can probably guess what this means.

- [inaudible]. That was good one.

- Yeah. But talk to us about it anyway.

- Yeah, actually, I caught someone on that one yesterday in class. So, you know, let's say we've taught a lesson on kind of the primary survey in first aid. You know, we're doing the airway breathing circulation, we do the check, we talk about it, everybody's done it. And then I start as though we haven't done anything and I just say everything again.

At this point, people are like, we've already learned that. What's going on here? And so the instructors will often waste up to 20% of the class just saying things again just because. And it's different to do a review, that's where you might have things being gone over again, but it shouldn't be you talking at them.

A review should be good questions. So, yeah, you see a lot of that sort of repeating the same things over and over again.

- Do you think people...you know, I know in sort of the marketing world, people talk about someone has to hear a concept or, you know, see your ad or something seven times, whatever that stat is. Do you think that that might be the reason why people do that?

- I would love if that was the reason. And I would love to know that I'm totally incorrect and everybody's doing this consciously. In my experience with instructors, they don't realize they're doing it. And I do agree, though, that repetition can be a really useful tool. The way that I'll often try to use that instead of saying something at someone eight times is I'll try to get them to tell me those eight times.

So, they're kind of applying it rather than just hearing it. But you're totally right, repetition can be really useful, especially when it comes to emergency stuff.

- Yeah. But I think the word tool that you used just then is probably the key, right? If you're using it consciously, you're using it as a tool. If you're not, you're being a tool. No, you're just...

- Well, I'm a tool every day. But yeah, you know, learning these things, you might still do all the same stuff, but doing it consciously it's different than just doing it because you don't know you're doing it.

- Yeah, yeah, of course. And then the last one is, you alluded to it before and it is kind of self-explanatory, but it's called let's talk about me.

- As we're talking...well, we're not talking about me at all, actually, we're talking about ideas. Yeah, it's enough about you, let's talk about me. Yeah. So, instructors will do this...sometimes I think they're doing it as a way they are attempting to use the tool of helping the students relate to a concept.

In most cases, though, it comes across as an ego, self-ego stroking mechanism where I saw one recently, I was a student in a class and the instructor often they'll say, "Hey, does anybody here have experience with this?" And you know the students will share their experience and instead of validating the student and kind of going on and using their experience to add value to the class, where they might say, hey, that's a great point.

You know, I'll bet you when that happened, it must have made you think this. And I guess that we're learning about this topic, that could be really useful to the situation you described. That'd be awesome. What often happens though, and happened in this class I was attending as a student, the instructor listened to the feedback and then as soon as the person was done talking, the instructor said, "Yeah, I've been doing this for 25 years."

And they carried on. They didn't even acknowledge that someone had just spoken or acknowledged anything about the people in the class and just kind of talked about themselves randomly for like five minutes to tell us how great they were. And if we can...

- Sorry, they weren't even trying to relate. Like, because I think sometimes I know I do this in conversation is I try to relate and say that's sort of like the time when this happened because that's my brain trying to fit a concept. But what you're talking about is not even that, just talking.

- It's just a segue into themselves. And I don't think any of this stuff happens because people are bad. I think they just don't realize it's occurring and you can see the disengagement. Like, I can look around the room and I can just feel when people are like, "Oh my God, get out of here." Yeah, it's just sad.

- Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that supposedly makes people the most nervous is public speaking. Like it's a skill. There's a reason there are groups like Toastmasters and I realize teaching isn't the same as talking, but...

- Well, it's similar. Certainly that same type of stuff.

- Yeah. You know, many people think if you can talk, you can teach. And it's not quite the same, not quite the same. Okay. So, in the realm of course delivery, you also talk about learner competencies. So, what are those and how do they affect the success of a course?

- Oh, I'm looking at this tree that I sent you. I don't remember what the context of delivery learner competencies. I don't know. I'm like, are we talking about like things we want them to be able to be...? Okay. I guess it could be things that...

- I kind of took it as let's talk about me. I kind of I took it as, like, don't go to...and I don't mean to sound paternalistic or something, but, you know, don't go to 5-year-olds and try and teach them how to do calculus. Like, start with their competencies, right?

That's sort of how I understood it, but I'm not sure if that's...

- Well, I'll take it because I had nothing and you came up with a much better answer. And whether that was supposed to go there or not, we could certainly take what you said and say that makes perfect sense because we do want to make sure we're matching, you know, what we're doing to the people in the room.

- And kind of like alignment too, where you said people who are say not used to sitting down all day or people whose literacy levels might be different or that kind of thing.

- That's right.

- So, if one of our listeners is looking to hire an external safety trainer, what are some red flags that you would like them to look out for?

- Oh, yeah. So one, and this is my bias, I'm sure it's not objectively correct, but if they sound like a dick, like just some people they come across, like if they go, oh, yeah. When people have that tone of voice, or oh, I've been doing this for this amount of time, usually I just I'm done with you.

So, I find if people just talk at me about how great they are, I guess it's related to the enough about you, let's talk about me. I would never want to hire someone like that if I could avoid it. I'd probably ask a bit about what drives them, you know, as an instructor because there's a lot of instructors that genuinely have a deep passion for helping other people learn. That's amazing.

And if they don't have that passion I just wouldn't want to hire them. And if you're hiring someone, you know, to build a course, if one of their first questions is, you know, how long do you want the PowerPoint to be? Then that would scare me a bit. I'd want someone that you're hiring to build a course to ask you questions like, why are we doing this course? How will this help the people that are taking it? You know, is the instructor concerned about the quality of product or how much they're going to get as a price?

Because quality I think is more important than those other details.

- Are there any things that you would look for specifically? Obviously, the inverse of everything you just said, but have you maybe hadn't experience where you were looking to hire or like either for your company or on behalf of someone to train and they showed a quality that you thought, okay, this is going to work?

- Yeah, I'm big into people that are authentic and that's probably the most...you know, number one. Everything else is kind of doesn't really matter as much. I think authentic human beings, you know, no plastic people allowed and people that genuinely care. And it's okay if someone does 9 to 5, 5 days a week and they're with their family or whatever afterwards, that's fine, but while they're there, they need to care deeply.

I don't expect people to work 24 hours, but if we're bringing our body to work and not our mind and not our heart, then I wouldn't want to work with those people because I am lucky to work with people that care.

- Great. Okay. Well, I have a few questions. We're coming sort of to the end, but I have some questions that I ask every guest. And this is kind of odd because our whole podcast is about training today, but when you talk about soft skills or human skills, if you were to train tomorrow's safety professionals, like the people going into being safety professionals, where would you focus training those soft skills?

Like, which skills do you think would be most important for them to get that would prepare them for the role of safety professional?

- Yeah. That's a good question. I prefer the term human skills. I've heard this [inaudible] the soft skills make it sound like it's not important.

- Yeah, I like the term core skills.

- Oh, that's great. I that's even better. In today's safety professional, a lot of people are getting it in that when we're working in the safety industry, it genuinely has to be about the people who could get hurt and how to make it so that doesn't happen. And often our focus tends to be more on how do we make more rules? How do we make more paperwork?

One client actually last week, we do consulting and he said, "I need you to go to my job sites and I need you to drop the hammer on all the people that are there doing not safe things and then send us reports." And that was a safety professional telling me that stuff. And like that's what happens out there. So, yeah, genuine care for the people and keeping them safe is I don't know what that skill is called. Compassion.

And another one is communication, right? Like, how do we communicate difficult messages where if I see someone doing something unsafe, yelling and swearing at them isn't the solution, right? They might comply now, but we want them to change their behavior. So, I don't know what else I would teach because I don't even know if I have all those skills, but being able to have those difficult conversations would be incredible.

- Now, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career and give yourself any piece of advice, what do you think it would be?

- That's a good one. It's not like I've done everything perfect, so it's so hard to think about.

- No, of course, not. And it's just one, it doesn't have to be the most important, but, you know?

- Focus on excellence. There's times where I've focused on things that weren't excellence and it was never worth any kind of short-term gain. So just focus on excellence.

- Okay. So, how could our listeners learn more about the topics in our discussion today? Like, are there any books, or websites, or groups, or projects that you think are really great?

- Certainly. So, a lot of the stuff I'm talking about it's not like I'm amazing or anything, these are just someone that's an instructional designer would understand the alignment immediately. So, around the course design information, the provincial instructor diploma at Van Community College, the PID program is amazing.

I took that years ago. And that or any information related to structural designers where you learn more about aligning your goal, objectives, assessments and those types of things. When it comes to instructional...the skills, I think you said core skills not the soft skills of how do you set up a classroom, how do you engage learners and that type of stuff, I don't have a good resource.

I'd love to see one. All of the stuff that I bring up there is just things that I've learned through the years and put a name to it. But I'm happy to share any notes with people that want to reach out or through you [inaudible 00:41:33] of the stuff that we've learned the hard way. And yeah, for course delivery, there's a three-day course called the instructional or instructor skills workshop.

I've taken that years ago. That was a great...you know, that could be a great starting point even for anybody that does teach professionally just to refresh their skills. And that's a worldwide recognized program. I'm not part of it. It's not like I get a kickback if people take it, but that would be a good place for people to look as well.

- I think even just sometimes knowing the terminology. If you're new into an area, like just knowing the term instructional design is a really good starting point for looking. Where should our listeners find you on the web should they wish to reach out to you?

- Yeah. So, our website is halandlearning.ca. It's Haland. And I'm on LinkedIn as Cameron Hacault. Our company has a LinkedIn profile. And, sorry, I forgot to mention when you asked, you know, about resources, there's this group, well, Thiagi is the guy, but it's also known as The Thiagi Group.

It's Thiagi I believe. I'll send you the info after the meeting. But I get a lot of my concepts or even philosophies from Thiagi. I've learned from him a bunch over the years and their group of people are kind of nerds like me, where they care deeply about learner engagement and learner success. And I've always found him and his company to be really inspirational.

They can be found on LinkedIn and on the internet as well. And I'd highly recommend them.

- Yeah, we'll find that and we'll put that in the show notes too if people are looking.

- Okay. Thank you.

- Well, thanks so much for chatting with me today, Cam.

- Yeah, thank you. This was wonderful, Mary.

- I'd like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team who have collectively designed this podcast where I learn something new with every interview and I hope, dear listeners, that you do too. Bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.