How effective is your food safety training program?

A well thought out and executed training program is the key to a positive food safety culture.  We spend a lot of time, effort and money on training, but how do we do it, what does it entail and importantly is it effective.  Please take the survey and post your comments below.  The idea is we share experience, best practice and perhaps improve our food safety training programs.

Regards,

Simon

Unfortunately, in these COVID times, our training has been backed up.
We have implemented a training schedule for the various lines to ensure that all members of a certain department get trained within the week that the training is scheduled, while taking into consideration "social distancing'.

We use Alchemy Systems as our training solution, which does include e-learning, but it's really not effective for the general rank and file on the production floor. Managers, Supervisors and some other people can stay current, but it's not the solution for the 20 people on X production line. These people have to be scheduled during the week with maybe 5 people at a time in the training room. 

Frankly, it's not working well.

Marshall

Last year around this time I did a training day where I rented out a presentation room locally and trained all staff at once (we were just coming off a plant shutdown). It worked out well, we bought lunch and also knocked out CPR training in the morning.

This year, I'm a bit at a loss. I can't pack everyone into a room like that and any room I have here at our facility is only built for 7 or so people max and I would have to do training 3 (maybe 4) people at a time to maintain safe social distancing.

We have an online program our company subscribes to where we can make our own online testing,with some limited training options (power-point style uploads, or could do a link to an online video). I am thinking of putting this years training on that and having employees do the training at home on their PC's, with 10 knowledge questions at the end of each of the 3 modules.

I was giving this whole COVID thing some time to shake out but it doesn't look hopeful here in Houston; I better just go with my online training idea.

Our training program is very behind this year due to COVID-19. I see posts about online training. What programs do you use for online training? I have heard of Alchemy Systems but my preference would be to create a custom training program that is relevant to our company not something generic. I'd like to be able to have exams and make sure the employees fully understand what they are being trained on. Thank you very much for your suggestions! P.S. This group is great and very helpful. I do not always comment but I definitely learn a lot from reading posts!!!

This topic is coming back around for me. The program we use (flexiquiz) only lets you create word doc style training or lets you link to Youtube or something else to present your content. If this was a simple monthly "hey lets have a toolbox talk about GMP's" type thing, it would work. For my annual training..not so much.

Anyone who uses Alchemy, is there an option to upload a PowerPoint and have questions at the end? Is anyone familiar with a training program that has this functionality?

Re Alchemy.

Absolutely. Using their Creator app, you can design PP training, place in questions and do remediation loops for learners that get the first answer wrong.

In addition you can edit Alchemy content to make it company specific. For example, editing out slides that are not applicable, and adding in your own content.

It's not cheap, but it's a great solution.

Marshall

I'm just about to put together some food safety training, but taking our plant process as the basis and not looking at general food safety in great detail. I'm in the planning part at the moment, I'm really going to cover the pre-requisite programme and CCP and appropriate legislation - the legal requirements for food handlers. I enjoy training, I enjoy the feedback from a group when I've got them joining in, I've sat through truly awful training sessions as well as some engaging training sessions and decided that some people are definitely in the wrong role. Of course the best reward is the behavioural change and the conversations at the hand-wash sink!

Julie

It's great to have training from experts through this quality network.