Over the past 50-plus years in production settings of all types, training has been largely made up of new employees spending either specified or unspecified periods of time with more experienced employees. At the end of that period, the experienced employee was responsible for pronouncing the new employee “trained.”

Sometimes, these practices produce an effective safety or training professional. It has been our experience in over more than 20 years of observing and discussing moves from operations to safety or training with several hundred organizations in a number of production industries, including electric utilities, that the move is not automatically successful. Furthermore, it is far less than automatic for some of the individuals that for years have been assumed to be perfect fits for these positions.