The Need

Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy is a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company that serves more than 3.3 million electric customers and 1.8 million natural gas customers in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico.

At Xcel, employee safety is of the utmost importance. The mandatory training focuses on a very important aspect regarding onsite safety that a worker can do in any job; communicate by using the Pre-Job Brief.

The Solution

In an effort to improve training for its workers in the field concerning best safety practices, Excel partnered with KDG to develop an eLearning course. The program is designed to ensure that Excel’s workers have the necessary knowledge and skills to stay safe on the job.

This course covers technical material such as OSHA requirements, fall protection, and hazard recognition using interactive scenarios and periodic knowledge checks. The scenarios are video segments of Xcel workers showing proper and improper pre-job briefing procedures. There is also an interactive case study covering how to fill out a pre-job brief form.

The training wraps up with a quiz, highlighting several filled-out pre-job brief forms. The learner needs to determine if the form is filled out completely and if not, identify what is wrong or missing from the form.

With successful completion of the course, the learner report is tracked and managed within Xcel’s Learning Management System.

Employees taking this course have found that this eLearning program is not just informative, but it’s also practical, raising the level of on-the-job safety.