Figure I Training – Get it?
These days, everyone needs continuing education to keep up with new techniques, new equipment, and new materials for new roles and new responsibilities. However, the right training courses are not always readily available when you need them. Luckily, there are some good on-line resources available to you (mostly for free) that you can often pursue at your own pace and at the time of day most convenient for you.
One of those, of course, are the TC3 courses we have pointed your way in the past. AASHTO’s Transportation Curriculum Coordination Council (TC3) has an online training library of over 190 training modules on Maintenance, Construction, Materials, Traffic & Safety, Pavement Preservation, and Employee Development. FHWA has provided local agencies with free access to these online training modules. This flyer describes how to login and use the promotion code to receive free access to this training. There is even a Q&A section outlining how to acquire PDH certificates if needed.
It has been a while, however, since we have pointed you to the National Highway Institute (NHI). They too have web-based training on a wide range of topics relevant to highway design and maintenance. Many of them are also free to local agency personnel. The same flyer is a good starting point for no-cost access to NHI’s web-based courses using your government email.
You will need to establish an account with NHI, but that is straightforward. Once logged in to NHI, use the Search for Courses function and check the Web-based Training (WBT) box. You can also narrow down to Program Areas, such as construction/maintenance, design/traffic operations, highway safety, pavements/materials, and so on if you like; or you can just leave “All” checked.
You will see that the price for most of the WBT courses is zero, but there are some exceptions. For courses of interest, clicking on the title will give you a description, a training level, estimated time to complete, and so on. When you find the ones you like, add them to the cart and check out for them to enter your training profile, where they will wait for you to begin them at your convenience.
These courses range from one hour to several hours and even more in a few cases. You can progress through them at your pace, stopping when you need to and resuming when you are ready by logging back into your My Training tab on the NHI site.
We won’t lie. There are a couple of duds in there. But, not many, and NHI is rather aggressively updating the catalog, so jump in and get learned, as they say (no one says that).
As always, if you have any difficulty, contact us and we’ll help you get sorted out.
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