3 Reasons to Consider Forklift Truck Training in the New Year

Companies all over the UK are hard at work preparing their 2016 budgets before the close of the year. Assuming you might be one of them, we have a question: do you operate forklift trucks on your premises? If so, is forklift truck training in your budget for 2016?

As a leading provider of forklift truck training in the UK, we frequently speak with corporate clients who tell us they prefer to keep training in-house rather than spend money on outsourced training. We certainly understand that in a day and age where cost-cutting is so important. Yet we still believe outsourced training with a specialist company such as ours is a better option than conducting training in-house.

We urge you to consider the following three reasons to include forklift truck training for your operators in the new year:

1. Your Legal Responsibilities

Regulations relating to creating a safe working environment require employers to take any and all reasonable steps to ensure the safety of both workers and customers. Where forklifts are concerned, all operators must receive some kind of training that is both documented and verifiable. An employer keeping training in-house would create a system of documentation recording when the training took place, how it was conducted, and what was learned.

The difficulty with this scenario is that a court may not agree that in-house training was adequate in the event of a serious accident. That risk is mitigated when you outsource forklift truck training to a company like ours. We train operators according to the standards of ITSSAR, providing an official certificate as verification.

2. No Loss of Productivity

When a company hires a new forklift operator and trains that person in-house, there is some amount of lost productivity as experienced operators are pulled away from their regular tasks to train the new driver. That is something companies cannot afford in the highly competitive day in which we live. Contracting with the HGV Training Centre provides dedicated training to your new operator with no loss of productivity in the interim. By the time your new operator is ready to start work, he or she will be more than capable of doing the work safely and efficiently.

3. We Train Quickly

Some of the companies we work with were initially concerned that we would have their forklift operators away from the job for several weeks in order to be trained. That is not the case. We offer three different forklift truck training courses depending on experience. Our five-day course is for the totally inexperienced driver, our three-day course is for drivers who have experience but no official certificate, and our one-day course is a refresher course for experienced and certified operators.

We urge you to consider forklift truck training in 2016 if your forklift operators have never received training outside of the workplace. Professional training like ours makes those operators safe and responsible operators who will protect your best interests.