Coming Soon: UW's Summer Professional Development Course

Are you looking for training for you or your team on product safety and liability, including the latest best practices and standards updates?

Each summer, the University of Wisconsin offers a professional development course on on-product warnings and instructions. This year’s event, “Using Warnings and Instructions to Increase Safety and Reduce Liability,” is coming up next month and is not-to-be-missed. It’s designed especially for engineers, technical writers, product safety specialists, insurance groups and others responsible for creating or reviewing warnings and instructions.

This year’s event will be hosted virtually over Zoom or Canvas over several days – from June 5 to 8, 2023 – with different safety and liability experts featured each day. If you are looking for other options, you will also have the chance to attend a different in person product liability conference hosted by UW later in the fall.

Clarion Safety’s Presentation: A Focus on ANSI, ISO, and Labeling Best Practices
Clarion Safety’s director of standards compliance, Angela Lambert, will be one of this year’s presenters, with an in-depth session on understanding key standards for safety labels and signs in the U.S. and internationally (focusing on ANSI Z535, ISO 3864-2 and the EU Machinery Directive), label content elements and label material/durability requirements. A full scope of Angela’s course is detailed below:

The Role of On-Product Warnings in Safety/Liability

• Why are safety labels important?
• Elements of an effective label
• Legal duty to warn and adequate warnings
• How risk assessment, labels, and manuals are related

Key Standards and Requirements for Labels in the U.S. and Internationally

• Levels of standards and a legal perspective on standards
• ANSI Z535 standards, including guidelines for label structure/ content, color, translations, durability/ materials, and complex messaging
• ISO 3864-2 standards, including symbol use and design, and wordless label format options
• Standards harmonization
• EU Machinery Directive

Winning Strategies and Latest Trends

• Latest updates to the ANSI/ISO standards
• The evolution of label formats
• Analyzing your intended audience
• A systems approach to safety labeling
• Digitalization and automation considerations

Team-Based Workshop Activity

• Evaluate warnings
• Develop recommendations
• Team presentation of findings

Additional Course Information
Topics explored by the other experts will include legal responsibility and duty to warn/instruct, environmental testing, writing and designing manuals and warnings, and evaluating warnings and instructions.

The sessions on June 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th will all run from 8:30am-12:30pm Central Time, and will be hosted over Zoom. To register, you can visit the University of Wisconsin’s course overview website.