Transcript
Hi, Chris. Welcome to the studio.
Thank you.
You’re one of the people who took the initiative for the ETTEC certificate. I can already spoil that. It has to do something with road hands and safety, but give us some context. What is it precisely and why was there a need for such certificates?
In fact, the idea started years ago when I had a student that had a bachelor’s degree from Ritz in Belgium and a master’s degree from Royal Welsh College, and she wasn’t allowed to work on stage in Germany because she couldn’t prove that she was working safely. That was the initial thought. And then we started discussing with people in different countries, and we felt very strongly the need for a basic certificate about safety for the theatre and event industry. And the reason for that is, okay, you can have people that do not do a pretty good job. That’s sometimes problematic, but it’s not dramatic. While if somebody is not working safely, he endangers his colleagues, he endangers the event itself, the equipment, and that’s what we want to avoid. So you want to be sure that somebody next to you is working safely. That was the basic idea.
From that, we started looking into the European Esco system, the competence system, and we kind of created ten competencies that prove you have basic safety. We’re not talking about safety on higher levels, like rigging and that type of stuff, but we’re really talking about taking care of yourself, taking care of your colleagues, working at height, ergonomics—things like having a harness and things like that. So it’s basically all the skills that everybody working in a stage or event environment should have. That includes, of course, your personal protection equipment; it includes almost everything that we all do every day, but sometimes do pretty wrong, to be honest.
Is that still a big problem in our industry?
Well, if you scroll Facebook, you see daily examples. There are a lot of amusing Facebook groups with good examples of why this certificate is needed. You’re totally right about that. No, but that’s absolutely true. And sometimes it’s because people just don’t know or don’t have the practice, because what we do is very much competence-based. A lot of people have had a training and they have a nice certificate that says you were physically there in the classroom when somebody was telling something, but it is not measured and it’s purely based on theory. And the core of what we want to do is look at it in practice. If you say you can work safely at height, I want to see you go up a ladder and do something there. That’s the core thing.
And the strange thing is that sometimes people that are very smart and very good students fail in the practical test, while people that have difficulty with understanding theory are working perfectly safe. And that’s basically what we want, and it’s the last thing that counts.
Yeah, yeah. I always say, if you have a fire, what do you want? Do you want somebody that knows all the fire classes, or do you want somebody that is able to extinguish the fire?
And of course, to extinguish the fire, you have to know the fire clauses. But the other way around, it doesn’t work. And that’s basically the concept behind it.
Another challenge, we were talking just before we started the recording, we had a little chat. And another challenge I think you are trying to solve is we are working in a pan-European context. Possibly there is a certificate in some country, but how do you know, if you’re in another country, what to count on and to be 100% sure that people are living up to those levels of expertise?
Part of the idea is also to have something pan-European. You know, especially with stagehands, if they’re on tour, they go to all those countries. How can you know that you have the right person on the right spot? But I think you went quite far in how to create that setup, how to create those policies to make sure that that’s the case.
Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
The problem is that education is a responsibility of countries and not of Europe. So technically, it would be impossible to have a European certificate. The welders’ industry gave us a nice example of how they dealt with that because you have welders’ certificates that are worldwide. Basically, what they do is if I deliver a certificate in Belgium, it is also signed off by all my other colleagues in the different countries that also have an assessment center.
So the way we organized that is we created a nonprofit organization called ETTEC that gathers all the assessment centers together, and they look into the quality of the assessment in the other countries as well. So that ensures that there is not a conflict of interest between, on one hand, you do the test, and on the other hand, you don’t have to make money, but at least you have to break even. Imagine there are twelve people and eleven would fail—the tendency to kind of lower the quality would be very high. But because we test each other and because we all have an interest in maintaining quality, we avoid that problem.
Another thing is that the assessors get assessor training in their local centers, but they are accredited by the international organization, and that makes them independent from the center. So in that way, they can’t be pushed by a center to change things or lower standards. The test we developed in the ETTEC project is a standardized test. It’s a simulated environment where you have to load and unload the truck, you have to build up some spotlights on truss, you have to put up some risers, you have to clean something. This covers basically these ten competencies. There are all little smart elements in that where we can see that you are really able to work safely.
If you do this test in Belgium, or you do it in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, or Finland, you should get exactly the same test, and the result should be the same. So that’s quite a high guarantee that if you have somebody from another country with a certificate, first of all, it’s guaranteed by your own local center, but you can also be quite sure about the quality of measurement. Additionally, assessors are not allowed to assess people they have trained or worked with before, which also guarantees a high level of objectivity.
Yeah, I also heard, and I’m not 100% sure, but is it true that there are already certain countries that recognize the certificate? I thought Belgium was one of them.
Yes. What happened in Belgium is that at one point they realized that internal safety training for what they call mobile building sites (and events held outside are considered mobile building sites), internal certification by the employer didn’t give enough guarantee. Especially because you work with hundreds of subcontractors and people whose background you aren’t sure of, they decided you need to have an external certificate. In Belgium, they certified the safety passports as valid for this type of thing. My guess is that will happen in the rest of Europe as well.
It makes sense. I also believe that for an event organizer or even an event business, that it has tremendous value to have people working for you who are certified, that you can also at least say that you did whatever you could to make sure your people work on a safe level, because those organizers, they will require it. I think in the future, that will get more and more.
The sad thing is that the reason often why they require it is not because they want to have a safer environment, but to cover their liability. That’s the reality we are living in. I’m not really happy with that.
Yeah, but if the result is a safer event, nevertheless, that’s a good outcome.
I think that’s true, but sometimes it gives kind of odd situations.
Yeah, that’s true. But anyway, I think it’s good not only for the employer, but also if I’m working on stage with someone, I like to know that he has the basic safety skills that I don’t have to look out for all the time, whatever you.
That’s hardly possible in an event situation because what we do in events is rather more complex safety-wise than you would expect. I always compare it with the cookie factory: there they put the white line somewhere, and if you don’t cross the white line, you’re safe. We do the same thing, except that the white line moves every 30 seconds to another place. So that makes people need a good insight Into safety and a good understanding, more than just having the practical skills. They have to be able to evaluate at all times where there are risks.
So in that sense, we are a rather specific sector because by definition we make things new. We make new things. We make things that never happened before. Otherwise, it would become very boring what we are doing.
That’s true.
And another factor in our industry is sometimes the insane deadlines there are. Because if the cookie is not ready, you make it tomorrow. But if you have a concert this evening, the show must go on, and if you’re late or behind on schedule, you need to finish. So that’s also something to keep in mind. You work under pressure, and then those basics in safety are really essential, I think.
Yeah, it really has to be a routine habit. It’s not like you have the time to look up stuff for someone if you work with your checkboard.
Okay, okay. So that wouldn’t be, in some industries they do that, but that’s completely impossible because it has to be ready.
Exactly, and so that means people need a high level of understanding but also a high level of routine. One of the things we see is people that work for a very long time in a structured environment, like a cultural center, sometimes get lost when put in another situation because they get into the routine of doing things always the same way. But in health and safety, you should be able to work in whatever environment and still keep these basic safety skills.
Yeah. And that practicality about safety, what you’re talking about now, that’s also included in how you perceived the training, because a lot of safety trainings are highly theoretical, or even the practical part is so standardized that it’s not even close to the real stuff. But what I hear here between the lines is that that is exactly what you wanted to do differently.
Yeah. So what we did in this European project is we developed a course of ten chapters, ten competencies, ten chapters. The first part is always, “How do you need to do stuff?”—the practical thing, and then you get some theoretical chapters.
What happened now is, with money from the Flemish government, the European Social Fund, and the Belgian Social Fund Podium Kunsten, they digitized all our content, and it’s open for everyone. So everyone who wants can go through this digital platform, and it has questions after every chapter.
And then you. At least that’s even free, or—
Yes, that part is free because ideally, everything about safety should be free. But the reality is, at the moment, we have to work for it; somebody has to pay. So all the manuals that are made in the project are open-source anyway. The digital platform is open-source. The moment you want to be tested or trained, that’s a different story because you need manpower to do so.
And then there are different ways of doing the training. A lot of people do this in-house, in their own theater, and they have somebody coaching them. In Finland, they did a lot of experiments where, for example, to retrain their experienced people, they took one chapter a month and put that in their toolbox talks every day. So they had one month with a real focus on one element, and then they got on to the next month, and so on. They also did short trainings in metropolitan schools, but they also did in-house training.
In an ideal situation, you would have someone in the organization that takes care of the training part because you really need the physical environment for that.
Yeah, the more that changes, the better. What we do in Belgium and the Netherlands, it’s now part of the curricula of the secondary schools and higher education.
Okay, so in fact, we didn’t need to do so much about that because the basics, of course, if you teach theater technology, you also teach safety. But they standardized it a little bit so that it fits in with what they are doing now.
And I think from next year on, they will also do all the tests, so everybody will get a certificate. In the Netherlands, they created a new curriculum for all the schools together, and it’s in there. In Finland, it’s in the curriculum, and in Sweden, we still have to make the official match, but it’s 99% because they were partners in writing it. So 99% of that will also be there, but they’re still working on how to do the testing procedures.
I can imagine if you’re watching now and you’re an event technician, you might say, “Damn, I didn’t have that course in college, and I want to do it” because I think many of those people will also see the value. Like you said, you want to know that the colleague who’s working next to you is also certified, so you also need to be certified yourself. What kind of time investment is needed to get a certificate?
If you take into account that you need to study a little bit, then to the exam, it’s difficult to say because it depends a little bit from person to person. We try to make the chapters, in both the paper version and the digital version, about the length of a truck drive to a job, or the waiting time between two changeovers in a theater. So ideally, you would be able to do that in what you could call “waste time.” That would be one part. I must say, experienced people go pretty fast over it.
And then you have to calculate for doing the practical test. The test itself takes more or less 2 hours because it’s a simulated environment, so you really have to physically do stuff. The test takes more or less 2 hours, but then you also have real proof of what you’re able to do.
Yeah, makes sense. I think it’s a very good initiative, and I’m very happy that we could spend some time talking about it and also bringing out the word to the working field that this is something new and this is something important for our industry. So thank you for taking the initiative and thank you for coming over to explain it to us.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.
You’re welcome. Are you at home? Thank you for watching our show. I hope to see you next week.
