Shawnee Love   •   September 4, 2020

Across the country, health & safety focused organizations have been providing guidelines and resources for training young and new workers to employers. In fact, in most jurisdictions, employers are held accountable for extra effort preparing new and young workers for the job. This makes sense because not only are inexperienced people more likely to be unaware of risks and the methods to protect themselves, but they also don’t have the competency necessary to handle situations which arise.  Unfortunately, new and young workers are also sometimes unwilling to ask for help or to ask the trainer to repeat themselves as they don’t want to appear slow or inept.  And of course, they may simply be overconfident (ahhhh the exuberance of youth).

The moral of this introduction is while you should train everyone in health and safety, their rights, responsibilities, and all the tools, practices and procedures, etc. you have to pay extra attention to those new and young workers.  Don’t just show and tell, but also follow up and ask them to show you how they do it. Repeat a few days later to ensure they still get it.

However, employers hiring new and young workers cannot and should not stop at physical health and safety. Come back next week when we discuss the other education younger workers are lacking.