Senior Advisor Dirk Bles on DEKRA Industrial Safety’s tailor-made training courses
Initiating change: “As an outsider you can get past the pain points a little more readily.”
DEKRA’s Senior Advisor on Industrial Safety Dirk Bles was born and raised in Zevenaar in the eastern Netherlands, but now lives in Gorkum in the west with his wife and two children. He began his career as a munitions technician, but soon moved into quality, health & safety, and the environment. Dirk has now spent four years with DEKRA Industrial Safety, where his work focuses on safety. Here he discusses his work at DEKRA Industrial Safety, and elaborates on the tailor-made training courses he provides.
Broadening safety knowledge
Armed with a wealth of experience in HSEQ (one of the acronyms for Quality, Occupational Safety – or working conditions – and the Environment), four years ago Dirk went looking for a new challenge, to deepen his interest in safety culture. “It was my previous cooperations with Arbo Support (the company that later became DEKRA Industrial Safety) that ultimately brought me to DEKRA. The merger between Arbo Support and DEKRA gave me the space to broaden my safety knowledge,” he recalls. Today Dirk’s occupational safety work is extremely diverse. “It ranges from conducting RI&Es to culture research, and from interim jobs to delivering tailor-made training courses. It’s the variety in my work which gives me the most energy.”
Lifelong learning
Dirk has been keen to keep his HSEQ knowledge up to date right from the start of his career. “When a market demand arose to tackle the issues of safety and the environment, along with quality, I followed several training courses to brush up my knowledge,” he explains. And that expansion of his knowledge is an ongoing process: “I’m currently taking a course in organisational psychology. That’s because with safety, you have to deal increasingly with safety culture, which is linked inextricably with organisational culture. The organisational psychology course teaches us more about the underlying processes within an organisation. This knowledge lets me zoom straight into the depths of a client’s question, without getting hung up on superficial answers. This is how you really add value for the client.”
“This knowledge lets me zoom straight into the depths of a client’s question, without getting hung up on superficial answers”
Tailor-made training
Dirk adds this acquired knowledge to his own training courses. “The training courses I provide deal with culture, leadership and risk assessment. I design each course based on the client’s needs. What is the problem? What has the client itself already done about this? Where does it come unstuck with this? And what does it want to see at the end of the course? Every client has its own systematics, and I adapt the course to that.” This is how DEKRA Industrial Safety adds additional specialisation. But not just that: “Often as an outsider you have more scope to implement change than colleagues within the organisation. You can get past the pain points a little more readily, which sometimes lets you set something in motion that an internal colleague would not be so quick to achieve.” Despite the customisation, Dirk’s training sessions always contain interaction and humour. “The information sticks best with exercises, assignments, feedback and humour. That also imbues the training sessions with the most fun, not just for the course participants, but for me too.”
The characteristics and qualities of a trainer
Besides having excellent presentational skills, a trainer must have his or her knowledge readily to hand, and must really understand the subject matter. “You can only convey something properly if you really understand what you’re talking about. And there are always questions from the course participants, demanding more than just a ready-made package.” But Dirk believes age also plays a part. “The older you get, the easier things are accepted. It helps me that I’ve been around for some time now. Getting my message across is just a bit easier now than it used to be.”
“You can only convey something properly if you really understand what you’re talking about”
From theory to practice
The courses related to VCA (health, safety and the environment) are a good example of tailor-made training. “The central question in a training course I recently delivered was: ‘How do you address someone?’ The target audience was all the client’s employees working directly with the customer. What if the customer doesn’t cooperate? How do you deal with that? And how do you then ensure that you can still end up discussing a solution? Those were the issues we got started on. I used Daniel Kahneman’s systems theory for this.” Dirk gave his trainees practical ‘tricks’ to pull a conversation partner out of the so-called System 1 – the fast, automatic and emotional way of thinking – into System 2 – the slower, deliberate one. “This is how you involve people in a solution.”
Want to know more about DEKRA Industrial Safety’s tailor-made courses? Dirk will be happy to help you!