Competence is one; and with competence comes self-confidence in the worker in what he or she is doing. With that comes speed, and efficiency, and so savings in money and less abuse of the machine, less wear and tear, and fewer time-outs for maintenance and repair.

ITI is one of North America’s largest training organisations—Joseph Kuzar is technical director there.

“Those are all good reasons for training,” he says; but sitting through an indifferent training course, no matter how good its syllabus, might not achieve the planned aims. For any of the benefits to be realised the training has to get through to the student. Which requires, says Kuzar, an added ingredient: “The hallmark of any good training is passion,” he says. “The instructor has to be passionate about his subject.

“Adult learners very quickly judge whether what is being given is of any value to them. So that passion has got to get through. You have got to bring them in in the first ten or fifteen minutes to get that trust established.

“Adults learn very differently from the way we did when we were high-school or college students. Instructors and trainers can feel comfortable in a classroom but for many trainees that is just not their comfort zone. They find it a stressful place; it adds to their tension and interferes with understanding.” A change of method, or sometimes just a change of venue, can be enough to transform things: “I remember a Canadian student I was teaching in the classroom, who was getting really rattled.

I said ‘Just give me five more minutes here and I will show you the exact same thing outside.’ Outside, on real equipment, he measured distances with tape on the load, instead of me describing it and showing it on a board, and he got it straight away. Not only that, he got it so well that he was going around helping others.”

And even in the classroom different methods get different results. “Very little is learned by ‘lecture download’,” says Kuzar. “We don’t allow Powerpoint presentations for example. We are guiding people through the workshop, and a lecture from on high is very little help with that.”

Certification must be by an “accredited crane operator testing organization,” (such as ITI), “and, when required, must be at no cost to employees.” Certifications are through written and practical tests and must determine, again among other things, that “the individual knows the information necessary for safe operation of the equipment the individual will operate; must have the ability to calculate load/capacity information; and have knowledge of procedures for preventing and responding to power line contact.”

Kuzar says: “Regulation 1926.1427 says in effect ‘This is what you need to cover on your course for certification of crane operators,’ but the Federal government does give some leeway to trainers.” And not all the regulations are as clear or as perfect as they could be: “The official definition of a ‘qualified rigger’ is ‘A rigger who meet the needs of a qualified rigger’!”

That may or may not be just slightly circular. Nevertheless, the same regulation states ‘that a qualified rigger must be used when hooking, unhooking, guiding and connecting a load’. “It would carry more punch, and mean exactly the same thing, if it said ‘All loads must be rigged by a qualified rigger’,” says Kuzar.

As she points out, an important factor in crane safety lies with the people who do not operate cranes at all. “I have been showing our VR simulator and hazard assessment programmes, and went onsite with the simulator recently to orient non-crane operators, to give them a feel for what it is like to operate a crane. The idea was to help them grasp what a crane operator can and cannot do. Things like clear lines of sight are important. We were able to show them that asking an operator to shift a load half a foot to the left is not necessarily a simple thing for him to do.

Safety is everyone round the crane, not only the operator; if a workman wanders into the path of a load, the consequences are bad no matter who is at fault. So we get people to sit in a virtual crane, to see it from the operator’s perspective, to see how hard it is to do small movements that from the ground look easy.”

Daniel Harding is commercial manager of Train-a-Lift, who have been delivering lift training since 1977.

“We started out with fork-lifts,” he says, “but when you are in a factory and there is a gantry crane and they ask ‘Can you train us on this?’ it rather followed on, and we built our expertise from there. Now overhead lifting is a big part of our business and we deliver crane training for the biggest names in the industry. Most of the training we do is for the gantry crane, or overhead crane; the vast majority of workplace cranes fit into this bracket. We can train on other cranes too of course: one of our mantras is ‘We can train on anything that lifts!’ We train on all kinds of equipment, from the smallest jib crane at small engineering companies up to nuclear sites, defence sites, secure sites—it’s a very interesting industry. We work also with some very large crane manufacturers to support their training.

“All crane training is conducted at our clients’ sites. This is deliberate for one key reason; it is best to conduct training on the actual equipment the operator(s) will be using. Our typical customer is a business who have invested in a crane and the staff to operate it and they want to ensure safety.

“The prompt for training may sometimes be may be legal obligation but going through the motions is not what any good training is about. The gain in efficiency— operators knowing what they are doing and able to do it quickly and confidently—is massive, as is the lessening of risk to safety.

“Overall, training isn’t a box to be ticked, it is an essential part of a safe working environment, one that benefits the employer, the employees and the equipment. Without effective training you risk damaging goods, damaging the machines but most severely there is risk to life and training—good quality training— must be taken very seriously.”

LEEA, the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association, train people how to inspect overhead cranes during regular maintenance checks, to help prevent accidents, and to comply with civil liability requirements should an accident happen. Craig Morelli is their training manager.

We plan when the crisis is over to put on assessment days to ensure that the learning has been successful.”

One day life will return to something approaching normal. Meanwhile training organisations are keeping calm and carrying successfully on.

Training in Vietnam

An LEEA-approved centre in Vietnam is JCD Training, owned and run by Craig Douglas. Douglas began by supplying off-shore training out of Aberdeen, for the oil and gas industry. “Contacts in the sector led to requests to train overseas, in the Middle East but also in Malaysia, Singapore and South-East Asia,” he says. “We lost our venue in Singapore three years ago, whereupon Vietnam-based providers PVD contacted me; we now have a joint venture based in Vung Tau, 2 hours south of Saigon. We have a training centre onshore, and we use a PVD-owned vessel also.

Crane training will make crane operations safer and more efficient