| Alberta Workforce Essential Skills (AWES) | Impact Study: Essential Skills and Food Sanitation and Hygiene Training |
The impact study revealed a number of barriers to workers' success in food safety training and certification. Limited essential skills directly impact the successful completion of the training and certification process. We are recommending these solutions.
Stakeholders continue to address and reduce the barriers that prevent workers from taking and succeeding in food safety training.
Ensure that food safety training for certification is appropriate and accessible.
Barriers to training such as time, distance, availability, format, and cost prevent food services workers from successfully participating in training. To reduce the stumbling blocks to participation, the availability of food safety training in small centres and rural areas needs to be increased. Alternative, cost-effective and manageable training should be widely available and convenient Workers' choices could include classroom sessions, correspondence/self-study, and computer mediated online courses. Ongoing education that includes refresher training via the previously mentioned options should be promoted by all stakeholders.
Develop food safety course material and instruction that addresses learners with language and literacy limitations.
It is recommended that clear (plain) language criteria be incorporated into the development of resources to accommodate a variety of learners – those with low literacy and second language, time limitations, different learning styles, and for those who choose the self-study method.
Verbal classroom instruction should be delivered using clear (plain) language principles. To enhance effective two-way verbal communication, considerations in delivery should include the difficulty of the terms used, the amount of information given, the organization of the content, and use of the glossary, plenty of demonstration, role plays, and interaction.
Increase communication and outreach about course offerings.
ARFA members need more detailed and current information about all the possibilities and alternatives in training – public health, private agencies, online, and correspondence. The key to successful implementation of a food safety system is accessibility to good training and communication amongst workers in all areas and all levels in the industry.
Help support workers with low literacy and language in writing the provincial exam.
Workers who choose to challenge the exam or do training by correspondence should be provided with strategies for writing exams.
To facilitate successful completion of the certification exam, the exam, too, should pay heed to the principles of plain language.