YOUR BUSINESS
Training is something that you should ‘want’ to do…OFTEN!
Juggling training P
BY JOEL DINSDALE QUALITY ASSURANCE COORDINATOR, VEGETABLESWA
rimary production of pre-processed fruit and vegetables as a very dynamic space in 2020. In my opinion, it can be described as juggling.
Currently, there are so many issues (balls) in play — many of which we touch on in this publication) and that was before the outbreak of COVID-19 came into the picture. This means that as producers, we are ‘juggling many balls’ in order to meet market requirements. With lots of balls in the air, it’s possible that these balls may be dropped along the line. So how do we keep these hypothetical balls in the air? The answer is by improving our knowledge. What’s the best way to do this? By completing training. I’m not sure who said it but “knowledge equals power” certainly is true in the fresh produce game in 2020.
So, what is training? The Collins English Dictionary defines training as “the process of learning the skills that you need for a particular job or activity”.
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WA Grower WINTER 2020
This certainly applies to Quality Assurance and Food Safety. If we look at all of the GFSI food safety systems that fit under the HARPS Scheme, you can see that Training is a hugely important element that needs to be covered in order to demonstrate compliance against the applicable system(s). In Freshcare Food Safety & Quality Edition 4.1, all of the training requirements are clearly outlined in the Standard under element M3 (Training).
Perhaps the most important element of training is completing Freshcare FSQ4.1 training as this underpins your knowledge in the system (and in turn, the training) requirements. According to the Standard (which references Appendix AM-3 on page 9) — a business is compliant to the Freshcare Training requirement (M3.1) if “management representative completes approved Freshcare Food Safety & Quality Training…evidence is kept”. This can be FSQ3, FSQ4 or FSQ4.1 training. (NOTE: you must be compliant to M3.2 requirements in order to be compliant to the whole M3 module of Freshcare. Check the Standard for details.) So, you’ve ascertained that you’ve got an Edition 3 training certificate on file (so your compliant). Why should you refresh your training if your already compliant?
The answer is, because you need to constantly build on your knowledge base (by training). Remember… ‘knowledge equals power’. You can’t run a marathon without first doing some training. In this analogy, Freshcare (or any other GFSI food safety quality assurance system) is the marathon. You can’t expect to finish it without first putting in the work… i.e. training. Training is something that you should ‘want’ to do…OFTEN! In my role as the Quality Assurance Coordinator at vegetablesWA, I have witnessed first-hand how refresher training has empowered and improved outcomes for growers, making them better jugglers. Late last year, a grower (for the purpose of this we’ll call him Mr Stuck) went to audit and had a really poor outcome for a number of reasons (in short…he was juggling and he dropped the Freshcare ball). As a result, he contacted Truyen Vo (Regional Development Officer, vegetablesWA) for help. Truyen and I visited Mr Stuck on farm and conducted a review of the audit and the system to understand where we could help. We decided that although the grower had previously completed Freshcare training, it had been quite a number of years since he had refreshed his knowledge base (something like five years since he’d completed training). A couple of weeks later, he was in the office completing an
