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In September, AIHA launched the Fatigue Management Learning Pathway, the first of a new type of educational resource. Like other educational materials offered by the association, it presents the knowledge of subject matter experts so that people less experienced in occupational and environmental health and safety can improve their understanding of a topic. But learning pathways differ from traditional online courses and webinars by being designed for learners at three levels of skill—technician, practitioner, and professional—as well as by offering greater variety and flexibility of content. Learners choose which level they start at. Then, they may work through articles, research papers, interactive content, and recorded lectures at one, two, or all three levels at their own pace.

SynergistNOW spoke with two AIHA staff members involved with developing the Fatigue Management Learning Pathway about this new educational format and what makes it unique.

What Is a “Learning Pathway?”

Alla Orlova, AIHA’s chief learning officer, explained how the learning pathways concept is founded on two of the association’s established resources, the Core Competencies for the Practice of Industrial/Occupational Hygiene (covered in a previous blog, Your Guide to an Industrial Hygiene Career) and the IH Professional Pathway. The former outlines the skills needed by OEHS technicians, practitioners, and professionals, while the latter provides a road map for advancing through the field.

Orlova explained that “the core goal of the Professional Pathway program is to help OEHS professionals develop competencies that they may not have acquired through traditional education or early-career experiences.” Most career planning tools tend to focus on advancement through an organizational or professional hierarchy, but the IH Professional Pathway engages with the technical, management, and leadership dimensions of OEHS. “It's not just about climbing the ladder,” Orlova said. “It's about evolving across multiple dimensions of expertise and responsibility.”

The Fatigue Management Learning Pathway embodies this goal in that it guides learners at each of the three skill levels to gain knowledge of a topic identified in the Core Competencies document as essential to OEHS. Lauren Corlett, AIHA’s e-learning associate, described how her team started to design the pathway by breaking down the fatigue management core competency. “We looked at it from the lens of what are the key topics in this core competency,” she said.

However, the specific content covered in the learning pathway depends on the level selected by the learner. At the technician level, learners are not expected to know anything about fatigue before starting the pathway. This level starts out by broadly defining fatigue, which Corlett described as “surprisingly hard.” However, by the time learners complete the technician level, they can expect to know how to recognize fatigue risks and advance to the practitioner stage. This second stage teaches learners how risks associated with fatigue are controlled, as well as how to confirm that existing controls are effective. Finally, the professional stage gives learners a “full, strategic understanding of the benefits and challenges of implementing fatigue risk management programs,” Corlett said.

What makes this resource a “pathway” is that the different levels of learning are not taught in isolation but flow into each other. According to Corlett, “The content builds on itself, so you could start out with no knowledge of fatigue at all and then, by the end of it, have a really solid basis for understanding how to implement a fatigue management program.” She explained how the learning pathway is designed for learners ranging from workers wishing to learn more about fatigue management in their workplace to OEHS technicians tasked with monitoring them to OEHS professionals seeking to improve their fatigue management programs. If they wish, a learner can start at the technician level and work all the way up to the professional level.

“We don't expect that you will walk out knowing everything you could possibly know about fatigue management, but it provides a really solid foundation” Corlett continued. “It's foundational information that you would need and a bunch of really good resources to help you get started building your fatigue management programs in your workplace.”

How Are Learning Pathways Unique?

Because the pathway format allows learners to select the level of material they will cover, they have more control than is typical of traditional OEHS educational resources. The three levels are packaged together, but learners have the flexibility to choose what they focus on. “The technician could take it all the way up to a professional level if they want that level of understanding,” Corlett said. “And a professional might want to skip the technician level if they already understand the basics of what fatigue is.”

And while AIHA’s e-learning materials have traditionally followed a PowerPoint-like format, with material taught through slides and recorded narration, the learning pathway model incorporates a greater variety of media. Corlett described how her team “gathered all the resources we could” when developing the fatigue management learning pathway. This included AIHA materials, such as webinars, recorded conference sessions, and articles published in The Synergist and Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene. “If there was any content that was missing, then we looked for resources online, starting with NIOSH, OSHA, and the CDC,” she added. Additional non-governmental sources were incorporated by links. Then, Corlett worked with two subject-matter experts on fatigue, Cathy White, CIH, CSP, CPE, of the Dow Chemical Company, and Madeline Sprajcer, of Central Queensland University, who contributed information in text and audio/visual formats.

Rather than a slide show, “this is more of a resource course,” Corlett explained. “So all of these different resources that I mentioned are gathered into one place.” The user interface resembles a webpage, which learners navigate to access infographics, videos, downloadable articles and papers, and links to external resources. The media include interviews with experts, which Corlett said was a new addition to AIHA’s educational resources. “We've not done that in slide-based courses before.”

Learners are free to navigate the pathway at their own pace, provided they complete it within six months of purchase. “The learning is left more up to the learner,” Corlett continued. “They're not restricted by going slide to slide to slide. They could really jump around if they wanted to read the resources that are relevant for what they're looking for.”

The fatigue management courses are only the first of the learning pathways to be created. Others are in the pipeline, corresponding to other OEHS core competencies. AIHA staff hope that this new type of educational resource will better prepare them to address fatigue in their workplaces, while providing an opportunity to gain contact hours for learners pursuing the certified industrial hygienist credential. It is also intended to help improve employers’ health and safety programs overall. According to Orlova, the Fatigue Management Learning Pathway “is expected to have a deep organizational impact, through reduction of fatigue-related incidents and absenteeism, improved worker performance and safety by aligning tasks with circadian principles, as well as foster leadership accountability through program audits and control reviews.”

“We want to have impact at the OEHS competencies development level, as well as the organizational level,” she continued. “We look forward to seeing learner feedback, employer feedback, evaluations for this new product from AIHA, and make adjustments as we go along for this or any future learning pathways.”

Visit AIHA’s website to register for the Fatigue Management Learning Pathway.