Why tradies and training are a work health and safety match made in heaven

August is Australian Tradies National Health Month but as far as we are concerned, it’s Tradies Month every month of the year. Tradies and work health and safety training go hand in calloused hand – not because they don’t know what they’re doing, but because they work in some of the most hazardous workplaces in the country and deserve the absolute best training to keep themselves and their colleagues safe.

Tradies are the technicians and trades workers, labourers, and machinery drivers and operators that make up nearly one third of the country’s workforce. From your friendly local sparky to the crew in hard hats on the building site, tradies are working on jobs big and small across the nation. Given the nature of their work, it won’t come as a surprise that they are at risk of injury. But when you consider that they make up half of the serious workers compensation claims, well, that gives a pretty stark picture of the challenge they are up against when it comes to work health and safety and the need for training to help reduce those statistics.

Some of the work health and safety challenges that tradies can face include:

• Working at heights
• Working in confined spaces
• Working around/in vehicles
• Working with asbestos and other dangerous materials
• Working with tools and machinery
• Lifting, carrying and putting down objects
• Repetitive movement or strain
• Trips and falls
• Fatigue and mental health

For tradies who are independent operators, it’s essential to stay on top of work health and safety skills as well as your trade expertise. One without the other is not much good and a safety trained tradie is a much better bet for jobs than an untrained one. Being able to present as a highly skilled tradesperson whose safety training is certified and up to date makes employment opportunities a whole lot more attractive. If you are an employer or a team leader, then you are also going to want people on the job who don’t put themselves or others at risk. Workplace injuries are bad for the injured worker, demoralising for the other staff, and can cause work delays and administrative headaches for the employer. Workplace health and safety training is small price to pay to eliminate these kinds of risks.

AlertForce offers a wide array of training options that will keep tradies on top of their safety game. Here are just three that experience shows us are essential:

Traffic Control Training

Work sites are inherently dangerous, largely because of the potentially dozens of moving parts operating at any given time. Effective traffic management in and around a work site can be the difference between control and chaos, between danger and safety. Tradies are often involved in the operation of machinery and vehicles on worksites and a tradie who is trained in traffic control has one more great skill to offer an employer and will be an invaluable resource on any worksite.

Check out our range of national certified Traffic Control training courses today. We offer on-site training that is practical, user-friendly and up to date.

Asbestos Awareness and Removal

Tradies work up and close and personal with a huge array of buildings and materials. For many more senior tradies, the horror of asbestos has been part of their whole professional lives. But for many, including younger tradies, asbestos is unfamiliar, hard to identify and not fully understood to be as dangerous as it is. Asbestos awareness and removal training will ensure that tradies put neither themselves, their colleagues, or the community at risk by teaching them how to recognise and safely plan for the removal of asbestos in a building.

Remote Area Training

AlertForce has the experience and the expertise to provide work health and safety training to tradies across the country and in Papua New Guinea. We provide training courses in the remote Northern Territory including to those young tradies looking to improve their skills and experience in remote indigenous communities. We believe that high quality training should be available no matter where you are and that all tradies deserve to be safe on the job. You can read more about our remote area training experience here.

Our message has and continues to be that work health and safety training is an investment, not an expense. Given the huge proportion of tradies that make up the Australian workforce and the risks they face on the job, training for tradies should be a no-brainer. Make Tradies Month really count by enrolling in training courses today. Give us a buzz and we can talk through your options.