The “Professional Development” catalog offered by School Training Solutions provides a wide range of useful information for employers and employees alike—information that can be applied to virtually any school or business setting.

Like all STS courses, the Professional Development track has the added bonus of meeting both the in-service training requirements and the professional development training needs of school district employees in a number of states. Areas of emphasis include:

• Conflict Management (6 hours)
• Health (11.4 hours)
• Safety (10 hours)
• Sexual Harassment (6.5 hours)
• Stress Management (3 hours)
• Workplace (6.1 hours)
• Driving Safety (14 hours)

Though all of these topics are important, three of them—Safety, Sexual Harassment and Stress Management—particularly catch my eye. The reason for this stems from a two-year period during my college years when I worked as a sales clerk for a well-known department store. Due to the content of this blog, I shall withhold the name of this store.

As I suspect was common in the 1970s, our employee orientation didn’t extend much beyond dress codes, the basics of how to run a cash register, the location of the employee entrance and lounge, and how to punch the time clock. Looking back, I have no doubt that the STS “Professional Development” course would have been a huge plus for everyone from underlings like me to the highest levels of management. Now THAT would have been some serious, five-star employee orientation!

Let’s talk about safety. I was hired as a sales clerk, but I soon found that I was going to be required to assemble everything from 10-speed bicycles to pinball machines to swing sets. I was never asked if I had any experience or aptitude for this kind of work, nor was I provided with anything remotely resembling safety tips. My assistant manager simply told me to go over to hardware and “get some tools and get to it.” I wound up doing a lot of mashing, slicing and spilling of blood, and I’m just grateful that I never incurred a serious injury.

Then there was the sexual harassment I witnessed. This involved several older male management personnel engaging in rude comments and certain types of inappropriate behavior vis-à-vis young female employees—actions that would get them fired in a heartbeat today. It was as if no one had ever told them there was anything wrong with acting that way, and the guilty parties acted that way on a daily basis. More than one female employee quit because of this harassment.

My comments regarding stress management will focus on one man—our division manager. He was as kind, generous and professional as the day is long, but I’ve never seen anyone with worse stress issues. His hands shook almost constantly, he was prone to stuttering, and he had very high blood pressure—all, I learned over time, because there was virtually no moment on the job when he did not feel tremendous stress. This man would have benefitted greatly from the kind of stress management techniques offered in the STS Professional Development course. I learned some years later that he had died long before his time.

Whether for a school setting or business, STS Professional Development covers all the bases. There’s something in there to benefit everyone.

Andrew Metzger
Guest blogger
School Training Solutions

Spring is a time for growth and new beginnings. Why not shift out of your comfort zone and try something new this year with online training? From flexibility, to cost, to consistency, the benefits of online training are endless.

School Training Solutions (STS) provides online training for school bus drivers, campus security professionals, food services, and professional development for administrative, support, and teaching personnel.

Explore our catalogs and courses —you’re sure to find something new to enrich your professional development and training programs.

 
Featured Course:

School Training Solutions (STS) offers a comprehensive Campus Security program that is custom designed to enhance the credentials and readiness of campus security professionals. These vital personnel can never have too much training when it comes to keeping campus environments safe, and the STS coursework covers every subject.

Try our featured course and be better equipped to help those like Hannah:

Victim/Witness Awareness

This 1-hour professional development course familiarizes employees with a process for understanding and effectively dealing with the emotions of victims and witnesses, emotions that can act as barriers to receiving complete and accurate information. It also discusses officer responsibilities to victims and witnesses as defined by federal law.

Hannah was a student at Pensacola State College (PSC) about four years ago. Because of my position as an administrator at PSC, I would see Hannah almost every day in the Ashmore Fine Arts Building where my office is located. She was a music major and also the student assistant to an Ashmore colleague who directs the school’s guitar program. Bright and personable, Hannah was the kind of young person whose sunny disposition could always lift your spirits.

Like millions of others, Hannah believed she was safe in the home-away-from-home environment that college campuses can become for full-time students, especially those who also have campus employment as Hannah did. Sadly, this notion often leads to a false sense of security—something that can be especially dangerous for female students.

Though fellow students can sometimes pose a risk, some of the worst incidents are perpetrated by people from the “outside world.” I frequently remind students in the Ashmore Building that there is no invisible barrier that prevents thieves from strolling across the campus and through buildings, searching for that unattended laptop or iPod. Often, they look at me as if that was something that had never occurred to them.

But there are worse crimes than theft.

I still remember the day I saw Hannah in the Ashmore main office, still shaken as she related an incident that had just occurred in another building on campus. A young man had confronted her as she exited the ladies restroom and, to hear Hannah tell it, his attitude had been aggressive to the point of harassment. She said he was young—the age of a typical college student—which meant he hadn’t attracted any special attention by being in the building. Criminals know these things—know they can walk around the average college campus with relative impunity as long as they look and act the part.

Hannah reported the incident to campus security but, as we would find out soon enough, it was too late to prevent the man from carrying out an assault a short time later in the very same restroom from which Hannah had emerged. However, thanks to Hannah’s report and quick movement by PSC security personnel, the perpetrator was apprehended before he could exit the campus.

School Training Solutions (STS) offers a comprehensive Campus Security program that is custom designed to enhance the credentials and readiness of campus security professionals. These vital personnel can never have too much training when it comes to keeping campus environments safe, and the STS coursework covers every subject. Ethical behavior and core values, public event security, cross-cultural communication, crime scene preservation, and victim/witness awareness are among the many topics included.

Andrew Metzger
Guest blogger
School Training Solutions

We here in the U.S. often take for granted the wide range of online education and training options available to us. The suite of professional development courses offered by School Training Solutions is an excellent example of online instruction that is innovative, self-directed and comprehensive. In addition, students taking STS courses have ready access to academic and technical support services.

Indeed, online education has many plusses for students of all ages, interests and education levels. But how has this phenomenon unfolded in other countries?

In my position as Executive Director of the Choral Society of Pensacola, I have the pleasure of working with a gentleman named Xiaolun Chen. Xiaolun serves as the Choral Society’s Artistic Director and also directs the student choral programs at Pensacola State College. Xiaolun, who is in his 50s, was born in Beijing, China. He moved to the U.S. in 1990, but spends a month in his native country each summer. It’s always interesting to discuss national and world events with Xiaolun because he provides perspectives that are often very different from those held by most Americans.

Recently, I asked my Choral Society colleague about the state of online education in China, which has the world’s second-largest economy, places a heavy emphasis on education, and whose population of 1.34 billion people has an ever-growing interest in all things technological. What he had to say surprised me.

“Even though China had innovations like televised university classes as far back as the 1980s, online education there is about where the U.S. was ten years ago,” Xiaolun said. “Where online learning in the U.S. really took off around 1995 with the development of web-based courses, something similar didn’t happen in China until around 2006 or 2007.”

A quick survey of the online education world in China today shows that they are catching up rapidly. From primary and middle-school classes, to higher education, to courses for “older learners,” e-learning in China exhibits extraordinary growth and diversification. There is also a growing demand in China for “customizable services” similar to those offered by STS. These types of courses include training for corporate employees as well as training that caters to the farmers and workers that make up a large of portion of China’s huge rural population.

All of China’s top universities now offer online classes and it is interesting to note that more and more foreign students are signing on to take advantage of distance learning opportunities originating in China. Foreign students have long been a part of U.S. e-learning, but some of these students are now finding their niche in China’s growing system.

It will be interesting to see how technological advancements will continue to make online education more and more available to China’s sprawling population in the coming decades.

Andrew Metzger
Guest blogger
School Training Solutions

STS offers online professional development training for transportation specialists and other school district professionals. Our CDL Prep course is a favorite in districts around the country. The STS CDL Prep course includes the following online lessons:

STS CDL Prep