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FALL PROTECTION Stranded Downriver/Shutterstock.com Your 4-Step Guide to Improving Fall Protection with Microlearning How you can implement a program that leverages bite-sized lessons to help workers fully digest a full course of fall protection education. BY SHAWN SMITH This past May, OSHA released a national emphasis program1 on fall hazards. The goal: lower the number of workers hurt and fatally injured from falls. If you’ve been paying attention to fall protection incidents, this program’s development isn’t particularly surprising. Falling has consistently ranked in the top 10 most frequent OSHA violations2 over the past several years. In 2021, roughly 10 percent of worker fatalities3 resulted from lower-level falls. Without being properly addressed, these falls, slips, and drops will continue to threaten the safety – and lives – of the people who work on your site. Here, I detail how microlearning can help with fall protection and how you can implement a microlearning program that delivers results and keeps your team safe. Background: What Is Microlearning? Microlearning is a method of training that delivers small, bite- sized pieces of content that allow learners to study at their own convenience. The primary aim of microlearning is to combat “the forgetting curve,”4 which highlights the ways learned information can escape people’s minds over time. A popular statistic people associate with this phenomenon is that humans forget 80 percent of what they learn within 30 days if they don’t reinforce the lessons. That lesson reinforcement comes in the form of microlearning, which helps for two key reasons: 1. It’s configurable. Whereas formal training programs must comprehensively cover every aspect of fall protection, microlearning can bolster any part of the training program. That means you can use it to personalize training on your site. For example, one company might have several microlearning modules on how to use a safety net system. Another worksite might not have a safety net and instead offer microlearning content on portable guardrails. 2. It’s easy to digest. A microlearning module shouldn’t be longer than five minutes. It’s there to boil down essential concepts of a training program. This means if an employee is on a lunch break and wants a refresher on how to use a mobile ladder system, your micro-content should explain that process before the employee finishes their sandwich. Another key benefit of microlearning is that it can be easily accessed from anywhere, at any time, using mobile devices or other digital platforms. And because it doesn’t require extensive planning to make time for it, microlearning is an ideal approach 10 Occupational Health & Safety | JULY/AUGUST 2023 www.ohsonline.com