Forklift News - David Hoover: Is your trainer really qualified?

David Hoover is president of Forklift Training Systems Inc, a US safety company specialising in site and forklift safety training, training trainers, custom program development and cutting-edge forklift safety products. Contact David Hoover.

When you prepare to fly out on holidays it is comforting to know your pilot has thousands of hours’ training and that the person who trained him or her was also highly skilled and qualified.

When you drive down the road and a large truck comes up behind your car it is comforting to know the driver has the necessary skills to operate the truck and that the people who qualified him or her took the job very seriously before issuing the licence.

Now enter the world of forklift training. Although things have improved since I entered the industry in 1991, there is vast room for further improvement with regard to qualifying trainers. Here are some problems with many forklift trainers:

What qualifies your trainer as a trainer? Many trainers have received little, if any, training on the standards that apply, how to educate adult learners, how to motivate people to work safely, how to hold trainees’ interest and, most importantly, exactly how to do the job they are expected to do. Any forklift operator would make a decent trainer, right? Wrong, it takes the right person to make a good trainer. I see information on the internet all the time claiming that anyone can be a forklift trainer with hardly any work involved. But no qualification worth having comes easily or quickly. Would you trust your court case to a lawyer who got his degree in two days?
To whom does your trainer report? Many report to production managers directly, and therefore are pressured to get training done in the cheapest, quickest way possible, which is not always the best way. There is no such thing as an "instant airline pilot" and that goes for forklift operators as well. Training takes time and money to complete. Hire them this morning and have them running a forklift in the afternoon is not going to happen safely, but I see it happen all the time.
How impartial is your trainer? I have seen companies with more than 1,000 forklift operators and, when you ask when was the last time someone didn’t pass an evaluation, they just laugh. I am not a gambler, but I know the odds are not in favour of everyone being qualified with that number of people. But if you have to keep your fishing buddy off a forklift due to his lack of skills, you may lose him as a friend. It is extremely hard to be impartial with people you work with every day, since you tend to look at the person, not the skills. Unfortunately that could get someone killed.
How much does your trainer train? One lesson I have learned from golf is that you must practice for your skills to stay sharp. If you play golf once a year, or every few years, how sharp is your play going to be? If you play every week or multiple times a week, how sharp will you be? The same can be said for forklift trainers, you either use it or you get rusty Even larger companies with lots of operators don’t necessarily give their trainers the reps they need to stay well oiled and current.

The moral of this story is to look deeper than the letter of the law to see if your trainer really knows the way, shows the way and goes the way. Or are they just going through the motions for the sake of minimum compliance?

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