Many lifties may be bumping chairs mainly for the pass benefits and mountain lifestyle, but the safety aspects of the job and the high level of interaction with guests make the position critical. There have been an average of 57.5 million skier visits yearly since 2002-03, and if we can assume people average ten lift rides per day, that’s 575 million times a year that a member of the public passes through the terminal.

But training a new army of lifties every year, given that they can come to the job at different times of the season and have a high turnover rate, often becomes complicated.

James Dubendorf, while working at Jiminy Peak, Mass., a few years ago, saw this as an opportunity. His aim: standardize and streamline the process. “We first looked at lift operations, and we thought there was opportunity to improve our training programs in terms of our ability to train consistently year-round, whether someone was hired in November or the Thursday before MLK weekend,” he says. His goal: make the process standard, consistent, and easy to use.

The solution he found was to use video as a tool, employing the medium after looking at the ways other industries use it to standardize training. The result is his online lift training program via Bullwheel Productions. Areas can use the program with lift ops personnel prior to their on-snow training. The program consists of nine HD videos and eight interactive quizzes, designed to take about an hour in total.

The program is broken into different aspects of lift operations, covering drive systems, rollback safety, daily pre-op inspection, tension systems and much more. The videos are packed with information, terminology, and illustrative examples, but are designed to be accessible to the first-timer that has little to zero working knowledge of chairlifts. “We want to catch someone up to speed in the basic terms and basic operations of lift instruction,” says Dubendorf.

Dubendorf sees lift operations as being of immeasurable importance. “Lift ops are the front lines of the resort and proper training is really an amazing opportunity to directly influence the bottom line, and that’s what gets everyone’s attention,” he notes.

Feedback from the Field

For the 2013-14 winter, two resorts— Summit at Snoqualmie, Wash., and Gunstock, N.H.—used the program to train a total of about 200 employees. Bob Stein, lift operations manager at Snoqualmie, says he trained about 160 employees with the program, and will be continuing with it in the years to come.

“The amount of knowledge that was contained in the videos, it would have required an enormous time commitment to show that same information in person to 160 people,” says Stein. “We want to provide consistent training, and Bullwheel’s program succeeds in that, as the employees had a good general knowledge of lifts and didn’t come in blind,” he adds.

Colleen Landry of Gunstock used the program to train about 40 employees, and believes the video medium fits in with the typical liftie age demo­graphic. “The generation that we employ, for the most part seems to be a hard audience to captivate in a classroom setting. The test results we received this past winter were proof that this is a medium that this generation is comfortable with learning.”

Stein saw only a few drawbacks. One was that some employees had outdated browsers, and had to use the computers on the mountain. In addition, some international students had trouble with the language barrier, as English was their second language and they couldn’t understand all of the terms and concepts presented in the videos. About 20 of the 160 lifties at Snoqualmie last winter were hired internationally.

About Those Benefits ...

Beside the direct improvements seen on the ground, the program eases the jobs of managers and supervisors by introducing streamlined training and paperless documentation of the training process. This simplifies resources and frees up time that has been traditionally spent in the office.

As a result, managers can spend more quality time with their employees. “It’s a tool that allows managers and supervisors to focus their time and energy to where they get their greatest return, which is on the snow at the lift working with trainees,” says Dubendorf.

Although any online program can generate skepticism regarding its ability to impart a solid understanding of chairlift operations—how much can you learn, really, sitting at a screen?—Dubendorf notes that the aim of the online training is to improve, not replace, the hands-on element. “Once personnel complete the course, they’re prepared to make the most of their hands-on training, right from the start. When they get on the snow, training can start at a walking or running pace, not from scratch,” he says.

And, since the program brings everyone up to the same level of knowledge, they can move on to the later stages with greater ease. “At the end of the day, the hands-on instruction is always going to be foundational, so we saw there was an opportunity for video to not replace hands-on instruction, but to actually enhance it,” he adds.

Gunstock’s Landry agrees with that assessment. “Nothing will replace the hands-on training, but Bullwheel Productions thoroughly covers the mechanical end of lift operations, and also is a great guide for general lift operations,” she says.

In the future, Dubendorf wants to move online video training into more markets and create programs that are beneficial to other departments. (Stein says that ski patrol will go through the lift training program next year, carrying the basic principles of consistency and reducing paperwork to a second department.) Dubendorf says his long-term goal is to “help mountains manage all their documentation-critical paperwork and to reduce training difficulties.”

On the near horizon, however, is an electronic lift operations checklist for lifties that will assist in the later stages of the training process. Instead of the traditional checklist that is the current practice at many areas, supervisors will track progress and evaluate performance on a tablet computer, such as an iPad, which will again standardize and electronically document the process. Both Landry and Stein are interested in adopting the checklist for the winter of 2014-15.

Overall, Dubendorf continues to look for ways to employ online training to make life easier for resorts. “At most mountains, training resources are stretched to their thinnest at the exact time they are most needed,” he says. That’s an issue every mountain would be happy to alleviate.