Can you believe it’s been five years since the start of the first COVID lockdown? It simultaneously feels like it happened yesterday and 10 years ago. While the feeling of being in lockdown is still fresh and visceral for many people, it’s also a strange and alien time in many people’s lives. Others are not lucky enough to be able to forget about it, and the devastating impact it caused.
For our industry, it had an enormous impact, and not only in the way you’d expect. While dealing with the health and safety ramifications of COVID on businesses was a major part of the pandemic, the larger impact it had on safety training was the rapid development of online training, something we’re still benefiting from today. It may have changed safety training forever—and not had as big an impact as we’d expect on actual health and safety.
From crisis to opportunity
The 5-year anniversary of lockdown also marks the 5-year anniversary of our remote courses on Zoom, including CITB SSSTS and SMSTS among others. However, the first remote courses we taught at SAMS were a backlog of CPC courses, as we grappled with continuing training while shutting our entire office down on the 24th of March 2020, and furloughing all of our staff, with only the two directors still working. It was that morning when it was announced there had been a temporary allowance to teach driver CPC using remote platforms such as Zoom and Teams.
Within one week the training was ready to go, and we taught our first candidates online, being the first bit of work we had booked since the pandemic started. Our setup for teaching from home was less than optimal at first, but our trainers soon adapted to the process, and one month on we had completed several training courses this way.
Before long, we were teaching CITB SSSTS and SMSTS courses, as well as Mental Health First Aid courses, crucial during the pandemic. This allowed us to make enough income to unfurlough our staff and get back to operational capacity. At the time, we envisioned that this would be a temporary venture, and all things would be back to normal. It would change training—and our business—forever.
The online revolution
The pandemic marked the true advent of online training, a shift we’ve largely stuck with. Despite offering classroom training again across many courses, online training opened entirely new doors and allowed the business to grow beyond what we’d ever anticipated.
Flash forward five years, and we have just completed a 5-yearly refresher of our SMSTS training with some of our first ‘lockdown’ candidates. That was something we didn’t think would happen, but we couldn’t have foreseen most of this journey. SAMS is now a UK-wide safety training provider, not just a regional one, even if our regional courses are still a large part of what we do and the identity of our business.
In retrospect, it’s amazing how quickly this barrier was cleared. Many individuals as well as employers went from not wanting to undertake ‘serious’ training online or not having the technical know-how, to learning online via Zoom and other tools within weeks. The simple fact of people being forced to engage with the idea of online training and online work in general caused the online training industry to explode almost overnight. Not everyone was quick or open-minded enough to capitalise on this, and we’ve been lucky enough to retain a lot of the audience and position that we built up during the lockdowns.
The way courses were taught and taken changed too. Online training forced us to focus on course delivery, imparting information as clearly as possible while also engaging people who weren’t in the room. In-person will always be preferable to a certain extent, but online training helped our trainers to hone their skills and become better trainers overall. It made sure they were attentive to the needs of every learner, something that is more difficult online when it’s harder to speak to individuals.
Lessons learned (and unlearned)
Learning online means using online resources, which has massively cut down on paper waste. As a result of not being able to police them remotely, exams also became open book rather than closed book. We much prefer this approach and have seen the benefits with our learners. With closed book exams, it can be more about memorising information than internalising it.
Open book exams make it less about memorising facts, and more about applying them to real world situations, proving that you understand the concepts you’ve been learning about. While you might imagine that this would lower pass rates, we’ve managed to maintain a pass rate above 90% for many of our online courses, a testament to the great work of our trainers and how we’ve adapted to the format. We’ve also been able to reach people around the world, letting them receive qualifications before moving to the UK for work.
COVID itself also had a dramatic effect. While most businesses pivoted to a work-from-home model, consultancy was important for those that didn’t, as well as during the first returns to the workplace after lockdown. When we did eventually resume in-person training, it was with perspex screens and social distancing. Many preferred not to return, and while we still offer a range of in-person training options, many learners came to appreciate the benefits of remote learning. We’ve taught thousands of people on these courses now, with many training from home, taking cars off the road and giving people a bit of a lie-in!
However, while most companies still allow people with COVID to self-isolate, the lessons from the pandemic in terms of workplace hygiene don’t seem to have stuck around—common controls like masks, thorough handwashing, hand sanitiser stations, ventilation and social distancing have all but vanished, despite the disease itself not going away. While the changes to training were here to stay, the consultancy side was less persistent. Companies (and people) largely wanted to remove the restrictions and forget about COVID measures as soon as possible and focus on more traditional risks.
A safer future
So how much has changed, exactly? It could be argued that the drive to get people back in offices more often and work more hours per week is now going the other way. Presenteeism is almost being encouraged, where people feel obliged to come into work even if they are ill. There is a bit of a backlash to this however, particularly from younger workers. The flexible working patterns introduced because of COVID have opened Pandora’s box, and we don’t think they will go away permanently—so it may be that attitudes continue to change, and we see a return to more flexible working (and online training!) in the coming years.
We would probably have benefitted from some of the ideas from the pandemic taking root in the way they have in some other countries. Time lost due to illness has a major impact on productivity and business revenues and could be improved with a bit more awareness and consideration around hygiene and disease prevention. But perhaps this will come with time. A deeper revolution did happen, one that brought changes to attitudes around working and training, as well as the value of self-improvement. Training during the pandemic was as much a way for people to occupy themselves, learn and improve as people as it was a job requirement.
There will always be a proportion of people who learn better in person, and benefit from that kind of direct learning and accountability. However, the demand for remote learning has now been firmly established. Even now, as many people spend less time in offices, online health and safety training remains popular. The pandemic has brought people’s mental and physical wellbeing at work into focus and highlighted the value of personal development. And maybe—just maybe—it’s also made people more conscious of health and safety.