ISO 14001 and Competency-based, Online Environmental Training Courses

Like most management systems standards such as ISO 9002 and OHSAS 18000, the environmental management systems (EMS) standard, ISO 14001 requires a procedure be established and maintained which ensures employee competency.  Specifically, the standard requires that the organization establishes connections between identified environmental aspects & impacts and an employee’s competency to mitigate those impacts, and ensure that those competencies are achieved and maintained through experience, education, and training courses.  

The plan, do, check, act nature of the standard further requires that checking and corrective action is performed to ensure that those identified competencies are maintained.  Considering that some organizations have identified hundreds of potential significant impacts, this can be a daunting program to initiate and an almost impossible one to maintain.     

Many online training providers offer environmental training courses online that may generally address, albeit in a circular fashion, those identified environmental aspects and impacts.  But, unless those training courses have a mechanism to specifically validate that the defined competency is achieved through the training courses, the organization cannot demonstrate conformance with the standard and does not have a functioning EMS.

The SafetySkills™ online training platform was specifically designed to allow for the targeting of specific online environmental training courses to specific environmental competency requirements.  By design, every SafetySkills Active Learning Element™ incorporates: a defined demonstrable competency; environmental training content designed to provide the competency; and a validation component that verifies the competency was achieved by the courses.    This approach allows an organization’s identified environmental aspect be directly associated, or “mapped” to specific competency requirements and then further linked to the employee, the associated  environmental training courses and validation that the competency was achieved and demonstrated.

Because each Active Learning Element™ is focused on a specific competency requirement at a granular level, and because the training courses are standardized across the organization, EMS coordinators can deploy real analytics, on normalized data with the kind of resolution necessary to affect sound environmental decision-making; the kind of decision-making that is made in management review and will provide for effective environmental planning.