NORCAT will have a hand in developing standards and an accreditation process to deliver training programming across Ontario, according to a news release.

In partnership with the Industrial Education Cooperative (IEC), the inaugural program, focusing on fall protection, will provide workers with training recognition across both the mining and the oil and gas sector.

Highly skilled workers are often required to be re-trained on the same content several times in the same year due to the lack of a standardized accredited training framework, NORCAT said in a press release.

Programming developed through the NORCAT/IEC partnership will enable a worker in southern Ontario to have their training recognized in Northern Ontario and reduce redundancies in training while ensuring the worker meets government regulations.

Worker’s training records will be managed and accessible through NORCAT’s secure advanced digital network. This proprietary system currently manages more than 100,000 individual training records and offers a strong value proposition in that the workers' record of training stays with them regardless of their employment history.

“The NORCAT/IEC partnership is going to provide workers in Ontario with recognized training across two major sectors which will save companies and workers considerable time and money while ensuring that they receive the highest quality of training based on government regulations,” said Jason Bubba, director of Training and Development at NORCAT. “Providing the worker access to their digital training records will enable a worker to show proof of accredited training and access their job site faster than ever.”

“Reducing training duplication while raising the bar with respect to the quality of course content is a shared goal for our two organizations” said Peter Stock, Communications and Strategic Relations for the IEC.