[Ssphrfaculty] Mandatory Safety Training for SSPHR Faculty

[Ian Milligan]

Dear colleagues,

One last time from me.

An excellent question from a colleague – how do you know which ones you might need to complete? If you go to https://uw.safety.uwaterloo.ca/dashboard# and login, you can see how you are with respects to your mandatory training.

And with that, my sincerest thanks to you all,

Ian

Ian Milligan
Director, School of Social, Political, and Historical Research
Professor of History
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From: Ian Milligan <i2milligan at uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 11:15 AM
To: ssphrfaculty at artsservices.uwaterloo.ca <ssphrfaculty at artsservices.uwaterloo.ca>
Cc: Ashley Price <ashley.price at uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Mandatory Safety Training for SSPHR Faculty

Hi SSPHR Faculty,

Me again. Don’t worry, I will try to take Friday off of mass e-mailing.

The University of Waterloo is making a major push to make sure that all of our faculty have completed their mandatory Health & Safety training requirements. I know this may not be everybody's idea of a good activity to undertake, but it's important for several reasons: (a) it helps keep the workplace safe and helps us understand our shared responsibility for safety and a healthy workplace; and (b) it is required under Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act and University policy.

All faculty must complete:

  *
WHMIS<https://uwaterloo.ca/safety-office/training/whmis-2015> (which needs to be re-done every five years)
  *
Employee Safety Orientation<https://uwaterloo.ca/safety-office/training/employee-safety-orientation> (just needs to be done once!)
  *
Workplace Violence & Harassment<https://uwaterloo.ca/safety-office/training/workplace-violence-awareness> - this course was updated in 2025, and must be re-done even if you have completed it before.

Right now we're at 66%! I crunched the data, and 37 of you need to complete Workplace Violence & Harassment Awareness (6 have never completed it; 31 are overdue for recertification); 23 need WHMIS (10 have never completed it; 13 are overdue for recertification); and 6 have never completed Employee Safety Orientation.

To enrol, instructions are in the links above, but basically you go to LEARN, click on "Self-Registration," register for the course, and go to the class.

For those who have not done WHMIS in a while, you are in for a treat. At one point you get to play "WHMIS Ninja" where you move a little character around to warning labels. It's mildly entertaining. And then when you’re on the 401 and you’re sitting next to a truck, you can begin to guess what it is carrying thanks to your knowledge of WHMIS labels.

Please take an hour or so to complete these training modules by October 16th. If you have any questions about your status, please let me know and I can plumb the depths of the 942-row Excel spreadsheet they gave me to help track this. If only my doctoral supervisor could see me now, he'd be so proud of how I am putting my research methods to use.

All the best,

Ian

Ian Milligan
Director, School of Social, Political, and Historical Research
Professor of History
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