General Information About Our Training

Basic Information:    

The subjects you find on this site are uniquely aimed at management and supervisory issues rather than technical issues (with a few exceptions). Most of the subjects are specifically tailored to utilities. Our goal is to identify, develop, and provide training, information and materials on topics that are important to managing safe, effective operations without duplicating what is generally available from other sources such as trade associations, membership groups, Statewides, JT&S, or NRECA training sessions. We want to provide important and valuable support to you on topics that may not be readily available from these other sources.

The subjects described in the site are subjects we already have done for rural electric utilities. What you find here is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of what we could offer. If you are interested in a significant topic that is not listed, please feel free to contact us to see if we could develop (or already have developed) a session on the topic. We’re most willing, too, to revise or alter any of the sessions described in this site to fill your specific need. We are always open to new ideas or requests.

Costs:    

We offer these special training sessions generally at no cost as a service to the rural electric utilities insured in our national program. The program is administered overall by Hurtado & Associates -- Power Distribution Insurance Specialists. Synebar Solutions, Inc., the safety consulting partner in this program, conducts the sessions as part of our normal value-added loss control service.

In certain special circumstances, we may ask you to pay a portion of the costs, but such circumstances are rare and we will discuss the reason for and the amount of the shared costs before scheduling the session(s). “Special circumstances” include things like conducting multiple sessions on the same topic to accommodate more than one group of your employees (which may require us to be there more than one day); conducting a session for a very large group that may require considerable handout materials; and/or conducting more sessions over the course of a year (at your request) than we can reasonably handle within the available budget for providing these services. Also, we assume these sessions would be conducted at your facility. If, for some reason, some other meeting facility is necessary (such as a local hotel meeting room), your company should make the arrangements and pay the costs.  

Scheduling:    

Our plan is to visit each distributive utility and G&T insured in our program at least annually to provide loss control/safety support, and we would prefer to use these visits to conduct one of these sessions for your team. To that end, we may ask you to be flexible in setting the date of a session so that we can arrange other work in the same geographic area while we are there. However, if your need does not fit our schedule, that’s okay, we will work out appropriate dates that better serve you.

In some cases, we may ask you if we may invite representatives from other rural utilities near to you (that are also insured in our program) to attend a session we will be conducting for your company at your facility. This saves considerable expense for us and often enhances the discussion and sharing of ideas during the session. We would do this only with your approval and it is not a requirement for you to take advantage of our offerings.

Materials:    

For most sessions, we provide all the handouts and workshop materials, and often folders for each participant. Also, if the session will involve people from other nearby utilities, we will provide table tents and/or name tags. We will bring all supporting audio/visual materials, but we would depend on you to supply any equipment that may be needed, such as video player and monitor, overhead projector, marker board or flip charts. The description of each session includes what A/V equipment we may need.