STA POOL PLANT

Changing From Training Rooms To Online Courses During COVID-19

In response to COVID-19, Safety Training Awards have been providing new and innovative ways of delivering pool plant qualifications online as a short-term solution to the pandemic, but could virtual training be a useful tool when things return back to normal? Luke Griffiths, Qualification Development Manager at Safety Training Awards discusses here

In March, at the time of writing this, all face-to-face training courses had to be cancelled due to COVID-19 and we wanted to provide a real practical solution to help ATCs through this unique time, while maintaining the robustness and quality of the qualifications.

With swimming pools forced to close and people having to self-isolate at home, virtual learning became a legitimate option for leisure operators who wanted to make the most of the downtime by training employees and save on future backfilling staffing costs. As well as facilitating ATCs to continue to operate remotely without face-to-face contact with learners – and crucially maintain an income.

With pool plant qualifications being predominantly theoretical, we created options for trainers to deliver the qualification online and as a further step, approached GoToWebinar who agreed to offer our tutors exclusive discounts on their interactive meeting and webinar services.

For learners, all they would need is a stable internet connection, a working camera, audio and a mic which are integrated in to most laptops and mobile devices. Plus, because all of our learning portfolios and revision packs are available in an editable digital format, learners can complete them digitally.

While online learning is not a new concept for many industries, for pool plant trainers it is a game-changer and could even change the end-to-end delivery of training and assessments in the long-term, post COVID-19.

Importantly, if the ease and availability of an online process helps even more people gain access to regulated professional pool plant training, this can only be a positive for the future health and safety of our swimming pools.

predominantly theoretical, we created options for trainers to deliver the qualification online”

To find out more about STA’s Level 3 Award in Pool Plant Operations, which was the first qualification to meet the Pool Plant Operative Professional Standard and receive professional endorsement from CIMSPA, please see the qualifications section of the Safety Training Awards website.

There is also further information regarding ‘Online Pool Plant Operations Revalidations and Conversions’ on page 4 of this issue. With pool plant qualifications being

Safety Training Awards | 01922 645097 | www.safetytrainingawards.co.uk

Integrating Conference Calls Into Training

One Safety Training Awards’ ATC that already offers conference call courses and training is Essex-based D P Leisure. Here, D P’s Dean Bolton answers some questions on the best ways to integrate conference calls into training:

Q What types of courses have you run using conference calls? A We have run predominantly non-regulated training courses, such as AED awareness and save a life workshops and these have been for global businesses who link up from all around the world. Our latest conference course was an AED awareness session for a British company who are based in New York.

Q From your own experience what sort of learner numbers work best? A D P Leisure personally cap each conference call session to a maximum of 8 persons per course. This gives space for any open talking over each other etc.

Q How have you assessed learners when delivering this style of course? A We assess learners by a verbal theoretical question session. We also send out an in-house question paper that learners can complete and send back to us following the conference call. We can then mark the papers and issue certificates of attendance to each learner.

Q Where do you deliver these training courses from? A The beauty about the future of training (conference calls) is you could literally deliver these from your own home or office. As long as you have appropriate equipment, a good internet connection, the audience, then questions that require to be answered without the confusion of others

you are good to go. This will be ideal for freelance trainers, or trainers who would normally only teach at other venues due to not having a physical venue themselves.

Q How different is it teaching a conference call rather than face-to-face? A D P Leisure thought it was very exciting teaching via a video link rather than seeing the learners personally. We do like to see all learners via video link, and to be honest it wasn’t much different. We still had the same questions, chats, and acknowledgement we would have had if it was a face-to-face course.