Box Ticked, Risk Unchanged
Ed Rideout has been involved with the electrical field in many ways for nearly 54 years. His electrical experience started when he was just out of vocational school and was hired as the sole electrician at a local fish plant in charge of six fishing trawlers, a power house and a fish plant facility. In 1975 Ed we...
Box Ticked, Risk Unchanged
The phone rings early, always early. A voice asks if we can “do a quick one” for a lot of people in very little time. There’s a rush in the words, a shuffle of calendars and production targets in the background. The request sounds tidy: one day, in and out, everyone gets a certificate. The story beneath it isn’t tidy at all.
Peace of mind or ticking a box? That’s the split in the road.
I’ve seen training used like a stage prop. A headcount gets collected, a sign-in sheet passed around, a stack of PDFs appears for the file, and someone somewhere reports that the plant is now safer. The ink dries faster than habits do. The file is heavy. The work is unchanged.
Let’s be honest: some people only care about optics. They want a headcount, a sign-in sheet, and a stack of PDFs for the file. We see them coming a mile away—asking for a thousand things in a day, splitting attention three ways, and expecting a meaningful result. That’s not reasonable, and it’s not in your best interest.
Most people aren’t like that. Most of you call because you know where the edge really is. You’ve watched someone hesitate with a hot panel. You’ve smelled the sharp bite of insulation that ran hotter than it should. You’ve carried the weight of a near-miss home in your chest and felt how heavy a quiet kitchen can be after a day like that. You don’t want theatre. You want fewer of those days.
The truth is simple and stubborn: training costs. So does downtime. So does a hand injury. So does a drive cooked by a rushed start-up, or a miswired CT that turns an ordinary afternoon into a long investigation. If you only compare invoices, the cheapest class wins every time. If you compare outcomes, the math tilts fast—toward fewer alarms, steadier hands, cleaner energizations, and Monday mornings that don’t start with excuses.
We get calls from both kinds of places. One wants the costume—generic slides, a brisk march through the “essentials,” certificates printed while the last example is still on the screen. The other wants something with fingerprints on it: their drawings, their isolation points, their failure history, their crews. The first kind asks us to compress eight hours into four and keep going while people duck out to “deal with production.” The second kind clears a room and means it. One is buying a receipt. The other is buying a result.
Custom isn’t about fancy. It’s about relevance. It’s about taking the blinders off so a tech who’s been doing this for a decade sees one thing differently—and because of that, does one thing differently. I’ve watched confidence ripple through a crew when the content in the room finally matches the work in their hands. I’ve watched the opposite too: a long day of motion with nothing to show but polite nods and a brittle promise to “apply this later.” Later rarely comes.
We’re not moralizing. We’re practical. If the way we’re asked to deliver won’t change how your people work, then the best thing we can do for you is say no. There’s dignity in a clean refusal. There’s none in selling you a certificate that won’t hold when the day gets loud.
The cost conversation is easier when it’s honest. Put the invoice on the table, yes, but set it beside one outage you can remember, one lost-time injury you’d pay a lot to undo, one weekend you’d rather have back than spend re-doing what haste ruined on Friday. Ask which line item actually moves the needle on those things. Ask which version of training survives contact with real work.
We can tell in the first five minutes who’s chasing optics and who’s chasing improvement. The optics crowd is always in a hurry. They want everything at once and nothing in depth. They interrupt their own questions with new ones. They ask if we can “send the certs first” and “make it generic so it applies to everything.” The improvement crowd does something quieter: they bring the right people into the room and shut the door. They name the problem out loud. They ask what will change when the day is done and how we’ll know.
One of my favorite days ended with a foreman calling the session “boring.” He meant it as high praise, though he didn’t know that at first. It was boring because nothing blew up—literally or figuratively. Because the checks were done in the order they needed to be done. Because people stayed in the room long enough to learn the thing they came to learn. Because the practice we did in the morning showed up in the afternoon when it mattered. Boring is the sound of risk going down. Boring is money staying in your pocket.
We’ll keep saying this the same way until it’s old news: if you need to tick a box, there are faster, cheaper ways to feel better for a day. If you want fewer close calls and fewer callbacks, if you want new habits to stick when the radio starts crackling and the schedule starts shouting, then give the work the time it deserves, and we’ll meet you there with something built for you. Not fancy—yours.
Because a box ticked is not a risk controlled. A certificate issued is not a skill earned. And if the only thing that changes after training is the weight of your paperwork, the cost was higher than you think.
Ed
