What Reasonable Suspicion Training Online Should Include So Supervisors Don't Snooze.......ZZZ

If DOT supervisor training for reasonable suspicion of drug and alcohol abuse is going to be effective, then one thing's for sure: 1) Supervisors must watch the program and 2) Supervisor must remember what they saw.

Oh, sure - you can get supervisors trained pretty easily, but will they act on what they were supposed to learn, when necessary, to intervene and refer a drug user or drunk employee to testing? That, indeed, is the question.

With these issues in mind, let's discuss several key ingredients of effective supervisor training that together will give you the best shot of keeping someone from getting killed in or outside of your organization as a result of alcohol misuse and drug abuse by a worker.

Restricted Training Program
Regarding online reasonable suspicion training, a restricted training program is a must. It is designed to maximize engagement to supervisors don't fall asleep

It must also be manual. No auto-playing like a movie.  It must be engaging, and frames must be clicked manually to advance the course. This forgoes sleeping. It does not run like a movie so the learner can snooze until the end. No way. Many DOT supervisor training programs for drug and alcohol course completion do, so guard against purchasing a program that allows nap time. (I know, I bet I am the only one talking about this. Guess why. I have been training and creating DOT courses for 20 years. I have seen it all.)

The web course should force the learner to click each frame, and the course must have two hours of content -- no not necessarily all of it audio-visual--in fact, definitely not. I will discuss this below.

Multi-Educational Elements -- Don't Use a Course with All Audio-Visual Content

Many DOT reasonable suspicion training courses have two hours of audio-visual content running as shown above in a video presentation. I have discussed the downside of this type of course, but let's be honest, employees will doze in front of such training. The motto: "Wake me up when it is over."

To prevent this, as stated, you must force engagement. But another part of this is multi-educational elements that go a step further to reduce risk in your organization.

You training become "sticky" when you have numerous ways to absorb the information: audio, visual, manual engagement, educational test questions, and printable, take-away handouts that supervisors keep, use later, refer to, and refresh their memories with months and years after training.

Since supervisor training for DOT supervisors is not required but ONE TIME -- they must walk away with resources that will help them act when necessary. 

Alcoholism Education--Make It Intensive, and Scientifically Based

Alcohol abuse, alcoholism, addiction, and addictive disease (ditto drug abuse) are confusing terms, completely embedded in mythology, centuries of arguments, family history, and more. It's a real mess. Everyone you know including your mother can tell you what any of them means. But most are wrong.

These terms in one form or another have been around 7,000-8,000 years since beverage alcohol was discovered in the form of wine by the Chinese. Luckily there has been enormous research on genetics to explain alcoholism, its cause, who is at risk, and why the disease is acquired.

If you do not punch hard at these issues, you will have supervisors walking way from the course completely unmoved in their fast held beliefs, which are usually completely wrong.

These beliefs, most of which are rooted in morality, will power, too much alcohol abuse, character, religious issues, and personality disorder-related myths and false models of causation, interfere with behaviors of a supervisor. As I author this post, a new study related to genetics that predicts alcoholism has just been released. You can see it here. Alcoholism is not an equal opportunity illness. It sounds clever, but the truth is some people will never become alcoholic no matter how much that attempt to drink. They will get sick, throw up, become adverse to drinking. They just don't the the genetic constitution to become addicted. Others will become alcoholic beginning with their first drink.

There are other elements to help make training more effective. But the most important common denominator of the above issues is that none of them are required by the U.S. Department of Transportation regulations governing training of alcohol and drug abuse of DOT Supervisors.

I will continue with these other issues in an additional post soon.

to prevent the supervisor-participant from skipping frames of the course, jumping to the test, completing it, and walking away without learning a thing.

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