Construction training: The complete guide
In the construction industry, there’s always something to train for. Without construction training, teams can struggle to adjust to changing standards, new requirements, and continuous hazards.
There’s no doubt that consistent training for construction workers is the best way to go, but it comes with several challenges. Your team’s busy schedules, varying roles, and different sites can make it difficult to organize impactful training. The good news is that you can overcome these obstacles—and we’re here to help you get there.
With this construction training guide, you’ll learn the best practices and tips that’ll help improve your team’s performance. You’ll also find key industry topics to cover so your members are equipped for a safe and productive site.
What is construction training?
Construction training allows team members to learn or refresh the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed in their roles and sites.
Here, your crew can improve in the technical parts of their job, such as task procedures and equipment use, strengthening their expertise. This skill development helps them complete assignments on time, accurately, and of a high quality.
Now that we understand what construction worker training is, let’s move on and discuss just how important a regular and consistent program is to your project sites.
The importance of construction training programs
Effective construction work training is a key factor in your organization’s success. It helps your business create necessary changes and improvements to your teams and operations.
Here’s why training construction teams is important:
- Increase safety: Construction worker training helps your team understand and apply safe working practices in sites. They can learn to spot task hazards and appropriately address risks by using safeguards, controls, or equipment. Because of this, they can minimize costly accidents, incidents, and near-misses at work.
- Improve technical skills: Training for construction can improve your crew member’s specialized knowledge and technical skills for their roles. By learning the best techniques and the right information, they’ll be able to complete projects that meet any client's needs.
- Proper compliance: Training in construction can also increase your team’s understanding of industry regulations and requirements. This helps secure compliance with quality and safety standards, making sure your organization avoids citations, penalties, and lawsuits.
- Boost site productivity: Construction training can help your crew complete tasks faster by teaching them efficient practices and procedures. Because of this, your organization can achieve shorter turnaround times and accomplish more projects.
- Enhance job quality: Training construction workers lets you establish and maintain high standards for your teams. It allows your organization to finish projects with quality and precision, needing little to no recall or rework.
- Minimize costs: When everyone on-site knows proper operations and procedures, your business will spend less on repairs, penalties, compensations, and downtime.
Next, let’s talk about how you can achieve these outcomes through an effective training program.
How to train your construction teams
The key to impactful construction training is making it a regular and relevant part of your team’s work. This makes sure your site stays safe, productive, and compliant.
1. Analyze the needs, demands, and risks of your site
Before training construction teams, you should analyze your crew members’ abilities and tasks, along with your organization’s processes and policies. This helps you identify the job needs, demands, and risks that your program should focus on.
By taking the time to assess your site, you can make sure that your program is relevant to your team’s work and supports urgent projects. To do this, evaluate:
- current skillsets and qualifications of your workers
- skillset and qualification gaps on your team
- daily tasks, along with the equipment your team commonly uses
- feedback from team leaders
- recent incidents, accidents, and near-misses
- documentation like safety audits, site inspections, project delays, and maintenance sheets
- results of Job Safety Analysis (JSA) or Job Hazard Analysis (JHA)
Through these analyses, you can create training that improves workflow, corrects behaviors, and updates your teams’ knowledge.
2. Raise team awareness of the industry’s regulations, standards, and requirements
In the construction industry, non-compliance of teams is one of the most common problems. Often, this is because workers are unaware of the business’s regulations, standards, and requirements.
What’s the solution? Clearly and regularly communicate these policies and protocols to them.
Essentially, you have to keep compliance at the top of everybody’s mind. You can achieve this through formal training sessions, refresher talks, and pre-work discussions that raise and clarify your team’s understanding of regulations. This way, crew members can correctly apply safety and quality requirements to their tasks.
Now, we know there are many regulations, standards, and requirements for your teams to comply with. Similar to the first step, talk to them about the relevant guidelines for their roles, tools, and workplaces. Here are some of the most important ones:
- OSHA 29 CFR Standard 1926: The safety and health regulations for the construction industry
- The state and local legislations and framework of where your sites are located. Take note that each location may have differences in laws.
- Local and national codes of practice
- Special codes and requirements for tasks like electrical, welding, machine, and HVAC work.
- ISO 9001: The global standard for work quality management, including your team’s processes.
- ISO 45001: The international standard for health and safety at work, proving compliance with employee protection laws.
- ISO 31000: The globally accepted guideline for managing risks at work.
3. Align training with your company’s goals and priorities
It’s difficult to accomplish a construction company’s business goals and priorities. It requires changes in your team’s practice and behavior, as well as adjustments in your organization’s procedures and processes.
Fortunately, training can create these changes. Since you’re already organizing courses for your construction workers, it makes sense to align training with your organization’s goals. This way, your team members improve their skills and knowledge to accomplish business targets.
You can do this by planning your lessons with topics and skills that support the company’s goals. For example, if the business aims to reduce the costs of downtime, your training should include courses and discussions on correct operations and equipment maintenance.
4. Personalize training for each member’s role
Every construction worker has distinct roles, each with their own responsibilities and challenges. That’s why a generalized training program may not be the most effective approach. Instead, you can group each member based on their tasks and sites to deliver personalized training for their specific roles.
There’s a handful of categories to consider when you group your teams in training plans. It’s best if you divide your crew members based on their:
- day-to-day tasks
- tools and machinery
- processes and practices
- common risks and hazards
- protective equipment, guards, and controls
- necessary inductions and work instructions
By personalizing training, you can boost your member’s interest and participation because they’re gaining knowledge that’s directly applicable to their work.
5. Combine discussions, hands-on training, and elearning courses
Each construction skill and knowledge needs to be trained differently. In the same way, every member of your team has their own learning styles and preferences.
With this in mind, combining training strategies helps your teams understand topics more easily, as every lesson is taught using the right method.
The best combination we’d recommend is a mix of discussions, hands-on training, and elearning courses.
- Discussions: Discussions are meetings, seminars, or presentations where you can talk to your team and fully explain valuable information. This is appropriate when teaching safety guidelines, quality requirements, and construction theories.
- Hands-on training: Hands-on training includes demonstrations and simulations that allow your crew to practice labor skills. You can use this method to teach work processes, tool procedures, and new technologies.
- eLearning courses: eLearning courses let you take advantage of digital learning techniques that can improve your team’s training. It uses videos, images, and other media that can shorten and excite learning sessions without sacrificing impact.
6. Regularly assess and track your team’s progress
After every training session, assessing and tracking your crew’s progress and improvements is key. This lets you know if your program’s techniques and topics were effective. At the same time, it can allow you to find room for improvement in your team’s abilities, making up what your next training should cover.
To assess and track your team members, you can collect feedback from their supervisors and ask about the quality and safety of their work. Another way is checking on the number of tasks they’ve completed and their turnaround time. Other than those, you can read their documentation, like reports and audits.
7. Use digital training platforms
From our previous steps, you may think that personalizing, mixing, and tracking training is great but too demanding. These practices might just cost too much time and resources. However, that’s where digital training platforms can exactly help you.
Platforms like SC Training can ease your worries and challenges when delivering construction training. These solutions offer tools that allow you to assign, combine, and assess training programs efficiently using less effort, time, and resources.
You can take Thermoash Group’s Woodglass for example. The building envelope company struggled with the same issues. After using SC Training, they can now easily assign courses to different work groups, track their progress, and assess their improvements.
Use the best digital training platform for construction. Sign up for SC Training today!
8. Offer refresher, retraining, and recertification
The construction industry continuously changes its regulations and practices. At the same time, worker skills and knowledge need regular resharpening. Your organization may also encounter local jurisdictions that require retraining before any work.
That’s why your program should include refreshers and certificate training to stay compliant and effective.
First, you can organize a training matrix that documents and tracks each worker’s date of credential. Add the last training session they attended and the topics covered to the tracker. You can also indicate if a member's role requires recertification and when it should be completed.
You can use the matrix as a guide for scheduling refreshers and recertification, as well as identifying the topics to cover. Here are some of the best times to do so:
- Once a year, as recommended by OSHA
- When a project is in a state that requires workers to retake the 10-hour OSHA construction training.
- When your organization introduces new policies and procedures
- When a member fails a job evaluation
- After every site accident, incident, or near-miss
- When regulations require it for a task or hazard. For example, OSHA requires heavy vehicle operators to retrain at least every three years.
Click here to learn more about creating a training matrix.
9. Give your team written guides
One of the most crucial training results is how well teams practice the techniques and procedures they learned. This can reflect the quality of your program and its impact on improving members. Ultimately, all these effects depend on how much your workers remember the knowledge they gain.
A great way to support their training retention is by giving them written guides. These could be manuals, checklists, procedures, and other training files that your crew can always access. With these documents available, workers can help themselves complete tasks correctly, consistently, and safely.
A workplace operations platform like SafetyCulture lets you distribute digital written guides in one accessible place. It offers tools like checklists and forms that help you make sure trained practices are always done right on the first try.
10. Organize safety meetings and toolbox talks
Safety meetings and toolbox talks are great additional discussions that can support your training program. These are simple seminars or huddles that give reminders, refreshers, and lessons about the safety and quality of your site.
Your safety meetings and toolbox talks can guide your teams back on the correct procedures that they’ve learned from the training. It can also help them address any new risks and hazards, allowing you to quickly solve issues and remind them of safety controls, measures, and equipment.
Key construction training topics and recommended courses
Below are some of the most important topics that your training for construction should cover, including free construction training programs we recommend:
1. General workplace health and safety
Recommended courses:
This topic discusses the importance of compliance with safety standards and policies to stay secure at work. It helps you raise team awareness of the most common hazards in construction sites, teaching them how to address risks. In addition, crews can learn the best practices for accomplishing tasks safely and efficiently.
2. Risk assessment
Recommended course:
Risk assessment training teaches workers the hazardous parts of their areas, equipment, and practice. Through this topic, they can learn how to identify health and safety threats on-site. Members can also train on the best controls, equipment, and guards that protect them from the risks that can result in injuries.
3. Personal protective equipment
Recommended course:
Protective equipment is only effective when teams know when and how to use it. This training topic explains the proper usage, removal, storage, and disposal of personal safety defense. They’ll also learn the different regulations and requirements for PPE, including maintenance work that makes sure their gear meets standards.
4. Fall protection
Recommended courses:
Fall hazards are one of the leading causes of injuries and deaths in construction. That’s why OSHA requires teams to retrain on the topic annually. This topic covers safe and compliant practices when working at heights like ladders, scaffolding, and rooftops. It also trains crew members on protective systems such as nets, rails, and harnesses.
5. Proper equipment use and safety
Recommended courses:
Tools and machinery are the most essential to any construction site, but these are also the most hazardous parts. Through this training topic, you can teach your team how to properly operate equipment by following the right protocols and procedures. They’ll learn about inspections, maintenance, and protective wear that can help them maximize use and minimize risks.
6. Excavation and trenching
Recommended course:
Land collapses are one of the major incidents that can happen at work sites. Poor planning and preparation lead to this hazard, which is why covering this topic is important. The training topic teaches members the correct steps for safe and secure excavation and trenching. They can learn to prevent accidents by training on-site awareness and assessments.
7. Hazardous materials
Recommended course:
Construction teams normally encounter hazardous materials through their tasks, materials, and equipment. In this training topic, crew members learn to stay safe and healthy when dealing with these dangerous substances. It teaches them handling skills such as hazard communication, exposure limitations, and proper housekeeping.
Deliver the most complete construction training with SC Training
Training is one of the biggest keys to a successful construction company. But to deliver effective skill development, you’ll need the help of a fast and efficient training platform that allows you to strengthen each team member based on their tasks and procedures.
At SC Training, we offer flexible and reliable tools that can help you train, assess, and ultimately improve your construction teams in one place. With our powerful yet simple platform, you can deliver tailored construction training that’ll help your crews meet industry standards and fulfill project demands.
So how do we do it? Well, SC Training delivers you these effective industry solutions to make construction training easy, consistent, and impactful:
- Quick and on-demand courses: SC Training keeps training easily accessible and consumable for your teams through mobile and micro-learning. Crews can receive quick, easy-to-understand training directly to their phones, allowing everybody to learn and improve their work regardless of the site or schedule.
- Ready-to-use training: Need to deliver a construction course immediately but don’t have time to research and create one? You can just grab as many as you need from the platform’s top-notch library. It contains hundreds of industry-grade lessons that’ll teach your team the best practices and processes in minutes.
- Seamless tracking and assessments: Using blended learning, you can easily check and verify each member's improvement—whether digitally or on-site—all in one platform. So you’re always sure that tasks are done correctly.
- Regular retraining and refreshers: Keep your teams certified and up-to-date with regulations using recurring courses. Simply reassign crews to lessons, and they’ll be notified to complete the latest version of the course, where they can learn about new compliance standards.
We’re here to help you make training a part of your crew’s everyday work in a snap, so they can stay on top of quality, efficiency, and safety. Join our industry customers like Fortune Johnson and B&M McHugh in effortlessly delivering better training.
Transform every site’s operation and safety using the top construction training platform. Sign up for SC Training today!
Author
Mackie Angat
Mackie Angat is a content specialist for SC Training, an employee training software that puts learning in the hands of everyone, everywhere. When he's not writing for the team, he lifts weights, discovers music artists and albums, watches old films, or supports his favorite sports teams.