James Tennant

A passion for teaching and language enabled James Tennant to launch his highly successful company Easy Guides Australia, which produces training manuals for the industrial sector based on visual literacy to explain concepts.

It all started with forklifts around a decade ago, he tells Forkliftaction.com News, when, as a workplace industry teacher, he discovered that many people who spoke English still had trouble understanding questions and answers in the government issued forklift exam.

He noticed that unlike the pictorial guides that one can use to study for a car licence, the forklift test was text-only. "I started explaining the questions and answers using simple pictures to explain each concept and that's how the idea to create a book grew," he explains.

The forklift training manual took Tennant a year to produce as he wasn't computer-literate at that stage and had to cut and paste each picture in the book's layout. But it took off immediately and was in hot demand. Today, the business employs five people, sells over 3,000 books a month, and produces manuals, posters and PowerPoint presentations across the entire industry.

With a Master of Arts in applied linguistics, Tennant believes it is essential to use plain English rather than jargon throughout business - from engineering to finance. "By rewriting the language used by professionals into plain English, I can prove that lower reading levels make information more accessible to a wider audience without dumbing down the content."

Tennant believes the recent decision to implement the National Standard for Licensing Persons Performing High Risk Work (Australian Safety and Compensation Council) is one of the most positive developments within the forklift industry. "It will put Australia ahead of other countries such as the US by ensuring everyone has uniform competencies and a national licence that can be used in all states and territories."

He adds that the stronger training component of the new licence will play a role in improving safety within the industry.

In turn, Easy Guides is in the process of converting its material to provide a comprehensive off-the-shelf training guide containing all units of competencies for assessors who have had to move over from the old accredited assessor system to the registered training organisations (RTOs) system.

In his spare time, Tennant is learning a second language - Afrikaans, one of the 11 official languages of his country of birth, South Africa, from where he emigrated half a century ago. "I'm probably the only Australian learning Afrikaans in this country, but I felt it was important to be able to communicate with the part of my family that still lives there."