Workers who could be exposed to fall hazards must understand the hazards and know procedures that minimize the hazards. As an employer, you can determine how to train your employees. What’s important is that, through training, your employees can recognize fall hazards and know how to minimize the hazards.

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• The trainer must be a competent person. (Recall that a competent person is one who can identify work-site hazards and who has management authority to control them.) The trainer must know and be able to explain the following:

• The nature of fall hazards at the work site

• Procedures for erecting, maintaining, and disassembling fall-protection systems

• How to use and operate fall-protection systems

• The role of each employee who may be affected by a safety-monitoring system

• The restrictions that apply to mechanical equipment used during roofing work

• The procedure for handling and storing materials and for erecting protection from falling objects

• The applicable requirements of Subdivision M for the type of fall protection systems used

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When to train. Employees must be trained before they begin tasks that could expose them to fall hazards or before they use fall-protection systems. They must be retrained when they don’t recognize fall hazards, when they don’t follow safe practices for using fall-protection systems, and when changes in the workplace or in the fall-protection systems used make their previous training obsolete.

What to put in writing. Keep a record of each employee’s fall-protection training. Include the employee’s name, the training date, and the trainer’s name. Record the information on a simple form like the example in Table 7.