On the Horizon for Safety 1st Continued from page 25 the best program out there and still the industry standard. I think it always will be, because there are a lot of good people committed to con- stantly improving and updating it.” Bob Schick, Director of Safety & Risk Management for TAC Air and NATA Safety Committee Chairman, noted the future of Safety 1st is about simplifying the content, adding new modules to meet specific niche needs, and restructuring certification pro- grams to accommodate task specific ratings to help shape career paths and growth opportunities for employees on the line. Schick is leading the team that will overhaul the Safety 1st overall mastery level as he earns different ratings, similar to the way a pilot earns different ratings on the way to full mastery and licensure.” Schick thinks the planned changes will help FBOs of all sizes train and retain employees, and could also create an opportunity for employers to develop pay-for-skills programs aligned with the accreditation levels being built into Safety 1st . training in the coming year. “We’re updating the content, making it more interactive, engaging and accessible, simplifying things where we can, and breaking every- thing up into more manageable chunks so that you’ll have more a la carte courses that are 10 to 15 minutes instead of hours,” Shick said. “And they’re all going to be geared towards building a career path. It used to be that you received your PSLT certifi- cate, and that was as high as it goes. You’d either completed it or not. With the new approach—we liken it to a merit badge approach—we’ll start by getting you your basic journeyman safety rating and whatever specific safety training you need for your specific job. For a guy who is going to be doing nothing other than fueling airplanes, we’ll get him accredited for that. Then, if he’s interested in learning more and moving around to different responsibilities, we’ll help him work through other modules that will certify him for other jobs and ultimately bring him up to an 26 “If we can keep our employees engaged and show them a training path for advancement within the company, with more pay for increased skills and responsibilities backed up by additional training and safety ratings, maybe we can keep them for five years instead of two,” Shick said. “Maybe we can keep them indefinitely. We’ve got to cultivate those folks.” NATA members are already beginning to enjoy some of the benefits of the planned updates to Safety 1st with the roll-out of the new subscription model already underway, replacing the previous per- person, license-based sales model. “The biggest problem with the previous sales model was you’d pay for training an employee, have that person get through some or all of the training, then leave the company before you could realize the full benefit of those costs, and then you’d have to go and buy another seat for the next guy and all of a sudden your training budget numbers are thrown off,” Schick explained. “The new subscription model is already allowing us to decide how many training seats we need for the year, pay for that amount at a fixed sub- scription rate we can budget and plan for, and get unlimited access to all the content so we can really tailor the training appropriately. If we lose an employee, we’ll just slot the next guy into that same training seat we’ve already paid for under our subscrip- tion. And then, if an employee has been through the relevant training program and keeps having issues, we can go back and re-train using the necessary modules without having to do the whole training again. Or if they’re ready to move on to other content modules, then we don’t have to make a budget call to see if we can afford it because they’re already included in the subscription.” The new subscription model was soft-launched in November 2016, and many NATA members have already made the switch or plan to do so in the new fiscal year. Michael France, NATA’s Managing Director of Safety & Training, hopes the new sales model will encourage users to take full advantage of additional Safety 1st training modules beyond the PLST, like the OSHA, Hazardous Materials and Regulated Garbage training packages that were previ- ously sold as optional add-ons. “Candidly, under the previous sales model we realized a lot of people were steering clear of some of those additional training packages, that the license-based sales model was actually providing a disincentive to doing additional training,” France stated. “The new model allows companies to accurately budget their training costs and gain unlimited access to everything Safety 1st offers.” France is similarly excited about modernizing every aspect of the program. Aviation Business Journal | 1st Quarter 2017
