By Gary Priest, Curator of Animal Care Training, San Diego Zoo Global Academy

Zoos and aquariums regularly revitalize their facilities with new construction projects. If you are responsible for construction at a zoo or aquarium—or know a co-worker who is—this column is for you.

A few months ago, I was contacted by Erika Kohler and Michael Ahlering, directors of operation for the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, respectively. Erika and Michael had a request: Does the Academy have a solution for training our construction contractors' employees on our rules for safely working on site at the Zoo and/or Safari Park? These contractor employees might be working on site for months, or for only a day or two. The goal for our two operations directors was to ensure that each employee of every construction contractor knows our organization's rules for working safely at the San Diego Zoo or the Safari Park. The directors wondered:

• Could we help them build a short safety training course?
• Could the Academy figure out a way to create and organize a list of applicable contractors and their employees for this training?
• Could the training be accessible on a smartphone or tablet?
• Could the training reside on a special dedicated site, specifically for San Diego Zoo Global vendors?
• Could the training include a short quiz?
• And, perhaps most important, in the event of an accident at a construction site, could the Academy be a source of reporting for improved compliance tracking?

My tentative answer was "maybe." It was a tall order, and this was new territory. However today, I can report the answer is a definite "yes"—a brand-new program to do all of those things is now being rolled out at both of our facilities, just as they envisioned.

The first order of business was to build a short, 10-minute safety course for on-site workers who are not our own employees. For course creation, we relied on an existing document that all our contractors must sign that spells out our organization's expectations for their employees' conduct while working at any of our facilities.

Construction of the short course was not difficult. But, the review process involving the heads of other departments proved more challenging. Many good suggestions were proposed for including additional information, however the operation directors needed to remind our reviewers that the initial goal was to create a 10-minute training course, not an exhaustive legal document. In the end, with that understanding, only a few simple modifications were required to satisfy everyone.

The course is now accessible via smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer. With help from our partners at CypherWorx, we were able to create a special Vendor Academy site that is uniquely set up for our contractors and their employees. For the initial rollout and testing, we enlisted the help of two longtime contractors. Each contractor provided us with a list of their employees who would need this training. We created a group under each contractor company name and entered their employees in this folder. During the final phase of testing, we successfully worked out the operational details—including developing a solution for contractor employees who didn't have an email account or a smartphone.

Your organization can benefit from this effort, because this contractor training concept is now available for all of the Academy community. Our contractor training course could be the starting point for your own customized training module. You can use our contractor training course as a template, customize it for your own operation (working with CypherWorx), and load it in your own Vendor Academy site. This allows everyone to go from "hoping" that contractors conduct themselves a certain way while working on grounds, to managing the outcome of this important aspect of operations with the right tool for the job—and that tool is training.

To view a sample of our Contractor Employee Safety Training course, click here.

What's great about the collaborative Academy community is that we can develop new programs like this one together, in real time. If this idea interests you—or if you have questions, or are interested in finding out the cost to develop a customized contractor module for your institution—contact Linda Duca at lduca@cypherworx.com.