Impact of safety training and interventions on training-transfer: targeting migrant construction workers

Abstract

Despite substantial efforts to improve construction safety training, the accident rate of migrant workers is still high. One of the primary factors contributing to the inefficacy of training includes information delivery gaps during training sessions (knowledge-transfer). In addition, there is insufficient evidence that these training programmes alone are effective enough to enable migrant workers to transfer their skills to the jobsite (training-transfer). This research attempts to identify and evaluate additional interventions to improve the transfer of acquired knowledge to the workplace. For this purpose, this study presents the first known experimental effort to assess the effect of interventions on migrant work groups in a multinational construction project in Qatar. Data analysis reveals that the adoption of training programmes with the inclusion of interventions significantly improves training-transfer. Construction safety experts can leverage the findings of this study to enhance training-transfer by increasing workers' safety performance and hazard identification ability.

Keywords:

• migrant construction workers
• safety interventions
• training approaches
• knowledge-transfer
• training-transfer

ORCID

Rahat Hussain http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6909-5189

Akeem Pedro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7884-5316

Do Yeop Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6559-8782

Hai Chien Pham http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7830-7967

Chan Sik Park http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2256-300X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) [No. NRF-2016R1A2B3016694].