Training services

Safety knowledge has a shelf life. Legislation evolves, best practice changes, and the habits and assumptions that develop over time in any management team can quietly drift away from what good practice actually requires. The IOSH Managing Safely Refresher is a one-day course designed to address exactly that. It revisits the core principles of risk management, updates knowledge in line with current legislation and guidance, and gives managers who completed their original qualification some time ago the opportunity to reassess their practice against a current standard.

Most organisations run the refresher on a three-year cycle. If your managers' original qualifications are approaching or past that point, or if there have been significant changes to your operations, workforce, or risk profile since they were last trained, the refresher should be on your training plan. The cost of keeping safety knowledge current is a fraction of the cost of discovering that it wasn't.

Health and safety performance in any organisation is ultimately a product of leadership behaviour. If the board and senior management treat safety as a compliance overhead rather than a business priority, that attitude filters down through every level of management and into the workforce. If they demonstrate that safety matters, the culture follows.

IOSH Leading Safely is a half-day course designed specifically for senior leaders, board members, and directors. It doesn't attempt to turn executives into safety experts. What it does is give senior leaders a clear understanding of why safety performance is a leadership issue, what the evidence shows about the link between leadership behaviour and incident rates, and what specific actions at leadership level make the most difference. It is concise, commercially framed, and delivers a certificate of attendance on completion. For organisations that want their senior leadership to genuinely understand their role in safety performance rather than simply delegating it downwards, this is the right starting point.

Construction sites carry a disproportionately high rate of serious injury and fatality. Workers who are new to the industry, or who have never received formal safety training, are at significantly greater risk. IOSH Working Safely in Construction is a one-day foundation-level course that gives site workers and operatives the essential health and safety knowledge they need to work safely, understand the risks on a construction site, and know what their responsibilities are under health and safety law.

It is suitable for anyone new to working in construction, or for experienced workers who have never held a formal qualification. Completion provides a nationally recognised certificate and gives employers documented evidence that their workforce has received a minimum standard of safety training, which is increasingly important for principal contractors managing their supply chain competency obligations.

Your safety management system is only as effective as the understanding your employees have of it. Policies that nobody has read, risk assessments that have never been explained to the people they're meant to protect, and emergency procedures that are posted on a noticeboard but never discussed are a very common pattern in organisations that have invested in documentation without investing in the people behind it. When something goes wrong, the gap between what the paperwork says and what your employees actually knew and understood is often where the liability lies.

Our H&S Essentials programme closes that gap. It is a practical, accessible introduction to workplace health and safety designed for employees at any level who have no formal safety background. Content is built specifically around your workplace, your hazards, and the real situations your people encounter, not a generic presentation that could apply to any business anywhere. It can be delivered on a timescale to suit your workforce, and it gives them the baseline awareness that underpins every other element of your safety management arrangements.

The most expensive employment tribunal claims almost always involve a process that went wrong somewhere along the way. A disciplinary that wasn't properly investigated. A grievance that was handled by a manager who didn't know what they were doing. A conflict that was left to fester until it became a formal complaint. The law doesn't require managers to be HR professionals. But it does require them to follow a fair process, and that requires training.

This practical workshop, delivered by our CIPD qualified HR consultants, equips managers with the knowledge and confidence to handle disciplinary and grievance situations correctly from the outset. We cover the ACAS Code of Practice, how to conduct a fair investigation, how to chair a formal hearing, how to handle appeals, and how to manage conflict constructively before it reaches the formal stage. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of the process they need to follow, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the documentation they need to produce to protect both the employee and the organisation.

Poor recruitment decisions are expensive. The cost of a bad hire goes well beyond the salary paid during a short tenure. It includes the management time spent dealing with performance issues, the disruption to the team, the cost of re-advertising and recruiting again, and in some cases the employment tribunal claim that follows a dismissal that wasn't handled correctly. Getting recruitment right from the start is one of the most cost-effective things a growing business can do.

This course covers the full recruitment process from role definition and job description through to structured interviewing, lawful selection decisions, and an induction programme that sets new employees up for genuine success rather than leaving them to find their own feet. Participants will understand how to avoid the most common legal risks in recruitment (including inadvertent discrimination), how to structure interviews that actually test for the things that matter, and how to design an onboarding process that builds engagement and reduces early attrition.

The way your managers lead has a direct impact on every aspect of your business performance, including your safety record, your staff retention, your culture, and your ability to manage change. Most managers reach their roles because they were good at their previous job. Very few receive formal training in how to lead, how to communicate under pressure, how to build a team that performs consistently, or how to have the difficult conversations that management inevitably requires.

Our leadership training programme covers the fundamentals of effective people management: communication and listening, delegation and accountability, performance management, building a positive team culture, and leading through change. It is practical, grounded in real management situations, and facilitated by experienced practitioners rather than theorists. Content is tailored to the needs of your organisation and can be delivered as a standalone workshop or as part of a broader management development programme for businesses that are serious about building management capability as a competitive advantage.

Fire safety management is often delegated to a fire marshal or a facilities manager without the person who holds the Responsible Person duty under the Fire Safety Order ever properly understanding what that duty requires of them. The Responsible Person doesn't need to be a fire safety expert. But they do need to understand the legal framework, what a fire risk assessment is supposed to achieve, what their obligations are around maintenance and testing, and what good fire safety management looks like in their organisation.

This course gives managers and those with fire safety responsibilities a clear, practical grounding in all of those areas. It is delivered by our NEBOSH Fire qualified consultants and covers the legal framework, the role of the responsible person, how to commission and review a fire risk assessment, evacuation planning, fire safety documentation and record keeping, and how to manage fire safety arrangements across a building or portfolio effectively. It complements our fire marshal training and is suitable for anyone who manages fire safety compliance without being a specialist.

Fire marshals are your first line of response in an evacuation, and in a real emergency, the quality of their training may determine whether everyone gets out safely. Yet fire marshal training is often treated as a tick-box exercise, delivered online or in a generic classroom setting with no reference to the specific building, the specific risks, or the specific evacuation arrangements the marshal is supposed to manage.

Our fire marshal training is delivered face to face and built around your premises and your evacuation plan. Participants will understand how fires start and develop, how to recognise the signs of a fire developing before the alarm sounds, when to attempt to use a fire extinguisher and when to leave it, and how to carry out a calm, effective evacuation of their designated area while accounting for anyone who may need assistance. Training is regularly refreshed to reflect any changes to the building, the occupancy, or the evacuation arrangements. For property managers responsible for occupied buildings, we can train and certify fire marshals across your portfolio to ensure every building has adequate, properly trained coverage.

Through our partnership with Highfield, one of the UK's leading awarding organisations, we provide access to a comprehensive library of online training courses covering health and safety, fire safety, food safety, manual handling, and a wide range of other compliance topics. E-learning courses are completed at the learner's own pace, on any device, and a certificate is awarded on completion. For many courses, the e-learning qualification can be progressed to a full accredited qualification via a separate examination if required.

For organisations that need to train large numbers of staff quickly and cost-effectively, or where shift patterns, multiple sites, or remote working make face-to-face training difficult to coordinate, e-learning through Highfield is an ideal solution. It can also be used to deliver refresher training between face-to-face courses, ensuring that knowledge is maintained and updated without the cost and disruption of bringing everyone into a room every time.