Coming to a mobile near you - safety training by phones is nearly among us

| Sunday, December 23, 2012
By Ian Pemberton


Reflect back 10 years. Mobile phones were just that: phones that were mobile. Laptops were twice as big and weighed the same as a PC. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn were only dreams to the soon to be gurus of technology.

Yet, in one decade, technology in communications has seen one of the biggest leap forward in development since the introduction of the PC. The greatest growth in the last few years has been the creation of the iPad by Apple and the many other products which have followed lately from similar companies. Its been known for a while from the technology business that touch screen devices are the way forward and are forever attempting to perfect the device.

Apple was not just the company that finally made a profit of the tablet, in 1987 it also was also successful with the launch of Newton, a touch-screen PDA that was stylus driven with full handwriting detection. Then Sony almost took the lead from all its rivals in 2004 with a Wi-Fi micro tablet.

But it was only when the iPad was created with its appealing designs and tablet like functioning structure that the consumer marketplace woke up and many people queued wanting to be the amongst the first to get one. Though you do not need an iPad to have all that new functionality and control; it is inbuilt into lots of smartphones that have more processing control than a PC had ten years before and have quickly come to overshadow the phone market.

The early adopter for latest technology is usually the consumer market; the industry always follows once the technology has become proven and tested. Companies often wait for the format conflict to stop before choosing the victor program. Previous conflicts were VHS against Beta and high definition against Blu Ray.

The present battle for tablet technology puts the google-sponsored open source Android device used in the latest handheld offering from creators such as Motorola and Acer vs Apples iOS platform, initially produced for the iPhone and now also for the iPad.

Y Generation

All this affects health & safety training as technology grows, training has had to adapt also to stay current to its audience. Mobile device technology has the chance to alter the way we deliver safety training programmes. This age of employees going into the workplace is the first to have grown-up with electronic contact, email, text, google, online social media sites and interactive voting no matter where they physically are.

To engage with these users we must develop the way we train. As Bridget Leathley proposes in her article, inactive "chalk and talk" courses are no longer an effective way of training. Audiences want to be engaged in their teaching and feel enhanced by the practise.

The first steps into new training has been by e-learning. Website based training courses track training, keep test scores and provide analysis of risk of individual employees. The past few years has seen e-learning speed ahead, providing businesses with important cost savings over conventional training and vital audit trail of risk assessments and teaching that is essential for all compliance training.

The newest wave of web based facilities also include editable courses, so that businesses can edit the courses to their exact sector without the normal high cost production prices. It additionally has authoring tools, so companies can create their own content and supply it to staff with pictures of their work place, their policies and procedures & company themes and logo.




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