Professional health and safety courses for those working in construction can save lives.

Many companies choose to send their employees on CITB training courses to make sure that they have a suitable level of professional training. There are a range of courses available including plant training through the CPCS scheme and general health and safety courses offered through the Site Safety Plus Scheme.

There are seven CITB training courses on the Site Safety Plus Scheme, each tailored to a particular trade or position within the construction industry.
 
The five day Site Managers Safety Training Scheme (SMSTS) is one of the most popular of the CITB training courses. It is aimed at those who have responsibility for controlling a whole site rather than a team of workers. This can be a challenging and complicated role and having professional training can both make the job easier and protected the wellbeing of those that are being managed. The SMSTS course covers the theory of running a safe site, including responsiblities under law and how to monitor and react to risks. It also covers the more practical aspects of being a site manager including disseminating information to your team and dealing with difficulties. The course can be done in a full working week or as a day release course. The day release course runs over one day a week for five weeks. This is particularly popular with those managers who need to gain the qualification but cannot spare a full week away from their role on site.

An important benefit of completing the SMSTS course is that the qualification can be maintained by completing a shorten refresher course, instead of sitting the full five day course over again. The SMSTS refresher is one of the shortest of the CITB training courses, lasting only two days. As it costs less than the full course and runs for less time, delegates do not have to spend as long away from site, meaning maintaining the SMSTS qualification can be done in a cost effective manner. All delegates have to do to keep up their SMSTS qualification is make sure that they attend an SMSTS refresher before the validity of their original certificate expires. The original certificate is valid for five years and the CITB also grant an extra six months grace, making keeping this qualification valid, even easier.

Another of the most popular of the CITB training courses on the Site Safety Plus scheme is the Supervisors Site Safety Training Scheme (SSSTS). This is a two day course, specifically designed for team leaders and covers practical safety concerns and legislation that supervisors must adhere to.

There are plans to roll out a SSSTS refresher and if you are interested in this contact an online search facility. As they work with large numbers of well respected trainers they will have access to the dates and locations where the first SSSTS refreshers will be run.

Other shorter CITB training courses available are the Health & Safety Awareness (one-day) and the Achieving Behavioural Change (ABC) (one-day.)  These are open to any level of delegate and are based on raising awareness on general health and safety issues and encouraging changes on site by changing peoples' attitudes.

There is also a Plant Managers full and refresher course available in the style of the SMSTS.