Health & safety changed quite a lot for everyone in 2020. Our personal safety became growing concern after the prime minister’s announcement. The wave of lockdown restrictions also meant that businesses like ours couldn’t function the same as before. Businesses were soldiering on through the blistering winds of economic uncertainty. Employees were put on furlough and business owners were put into distraught as small businesses started to collapse and close, but luckily for us it gave us the momentum to create a new platform to deliver on and an opportunity to build on what we had created during the pandemic.
Today marks the 3 year anniversary since we made the best decision we could of ever done for SAMS – we released our first ZOOM course. The falling demand for our classroom courses due to the new restrictions, gave us no choice but to think on our feet to keep SAMS afloat.
The DVSA had allowed for training to be delivered via a remote link. Therefore, we were able to use the wonderous app ZOOM to deliver our first ever remote CPC course!
3 years on, we can certainly say that the thing that helped us above all else is the boom in remote learning. As people became more familiar with platforms like Zoom, the fears around doing a course remotely had eased and we have continued to benefit. We can officially say we are now recognised as remote specialists and a national company. SAMS has now taught students from all over the world, from New York to Poland and even Dubai. It seems, everyone is now hopping on board the new way of learning.
We even did a survey in 2022 to understand what our student thought of the new platform. We asked 145 of our Zoom learners what they thought of the remote learning format, and whether it should stay and the results showed a firm yes with 130 students saying we should keep it even though 99 of those students had not used remote learning before.
SAMS has had an incredible response to remote learning over the past 3 years, and now most of our courses have the option of being delivered via ZOOM and/or eLearning which is something we couldn’t do before. We have really enjoyed teaching people from all over the country/world therefore we will continue expanding our options as time goes on.
There are several options for remote learning course including SSSTS, SMSTS and the CITB Health & Safety awareness.