Learning online is a great option for anyone that has not got the time or flexibility to attend a classroom course.
Many of our highly respected health and safety courses are available as online courses, including the IOSH Managing Safely®, NEBOSH General Certificate and NEBOSH Fire Certificate.
These online health and safety courses allow you to develop your skills in occupational health and safety at your own pace and in your own time. NEBOSH certificate exams have recently been updated to be entirely online open book examinations, which means that aside from any workplace-based practical assessments, these courses are able to be completed fully online.
Set a goal:
What are you looking to achieve, and when do you want to achieve it?
If your objective is to complete the NEBOSH General Certificate in 6 months’ time, then you need to be prepared to hold yourself accountable to it.
Try setting goals that are SMART:
Specific – What do you want to achieve?
Measurable – How are you going to measure your progress?
Achievable – Is the goal something you can complete?
Realistic – Is the goal realistic?
Time-limited – How much time are you going to give yourself to achieve this?
Set a target amount of time to spend learning each week:
You would be surprised how much you can get done with just a few hours of learning a week, and as such it’s a good idea to set yourself a target for the amount of time you want to spend learning each week.
You can access your online learning materials at any time, so if you’ve got a spare 10 minutes before work each day, or can spend 15 minutes of your lunch break learning online, these will quickly add up.
Our e-learning courses are unitised and follow the syllabus set out by the awarding body closely, this means that you can tackle the course one unit at a time and work through it bit by bit until you are ready to complete your assessments.
Apply what you’re learning:
As you’re going through your course, apply what you’re learning to your life and the things that you do. It can be a great learning exercise to think about how health and safety can apply to different real-life scenarios – you don’t even need to leave your home to do this.
Next time you watch a DIY show on TV, keep an eye on if they’re wearing the correct PPE for a task, if they aren’t using ventilation for dust or they’re misusing a scaffolding tower. While you’re out and about in your day-to-day life, pay more attention to your surroundings and apply what you have learned in your studies.
If you see a construction site, think about the signage that they’re using, the ways that they’ve prevented the public from accessing the site, what equipment is on site and how it’s being used. Applying your learning to these real-life scenarios helps you to contextualise your learning, and develop your understanding of health and safety’s applications in the real world.
Research around the topics:
It always helps to research around the topics and find out any information that you may need in order to apply your course materials to your workplace or the type of workplace you’re hoping to work in.
The course materials follow the syllabus closely, but sometimes it will take a little extra work to get your knowledge up to par with the requirements of your workplace.
An example of this is finding out the legislation that applies to issues like working at height in the environment that you are employed in, there are many different processes equipment that comes under the remit of working at height, including anything from a step stool to a large external ladder on a building.
You will need to find out what equipment your workplace has, how it is used, and then apply legislation and best practice in order to evaluate the risks associated with the tasks.