Workforce Readiness
What is workforce readiness?
Workforce readiness is the ability of employees to safely and effectively meet the physical demands of their jobs. It includes physical capability, movement quality, recovery, health behaviors, and workplace conditions.
What is a Workplace Athlete?
A Workplace Athlete is an employee whose body is essential to job performance. Just as athletes prepare for competition, workplace athletes benefit from training, recovery, movement education, and injury risk reduction strategies.
How is workforce readiness different from safety?
Safety programs focus on controlling hazards. Workforce readiness focuses on preparing workers to perform safely within those environments. Both are important and work together.
What causes most musculoskeletal injuries at work?
Most musculoskeletal injuries result from a combination of physical job demands, movement habits, fatigue, recovery capacity, and underlying health factors rather than a single lifting event.
What industries benefit most from workforce readiness programs?
Workforce readiness programs are commonly used in utilities, construction, manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, healthcare, public safety, and other industries where employees perform physically demanding work.
How do I improve workforce resilience?
Workforce resilience improves when organizations address both the physical demands of work and the health of the workforce. This often includes ergonomic improvements, movement education, exercise, nutrition, early reporting, and employee support programs.
Athletic Trainers
What is an Athletic Trainer?
Athletic Trainers are allied healthcare professionals with advanced musculoskeletal and medical training from accredited universities. They support injury prevention, early recognition of discomfort, and a guided return to activity after injury. At CIPS, we consider your employees workplace athletes, and our Athletic Trainers bring a sports medicine perspective to your worksite, blending injury prevention expertise with workplace safety practices to create a more resilient workforce.
What is the Sports Medicine Model?
The Sports Medicine Model encompasses three domains: prevention-focused care, early recognition of discomfort to prevent injuries, and guided return after an injury or illness. CIPS Athletic Trainers use this model to develop your workplace athletes' confidence and resilience.
Why use an Athletic Trainer instead of a personal trainer?
Athletic Trainers are licensed healthcare professionals educated in injury prevention, movement assessment, rehabilitation, and workforce readiness strategies, not fitness instructors. Most hold Master's or Doctorate degrees and may carry additional credentials such as Certified Ergonomics Assessment Specialist (CEAS), Advanced Office Ergonomics Assessment Specialist (AOEAS), or Certified Exercise Specialist (CES).
What does an Athletic Trainer do in an industrial setting?
Industrial Athletic Trainers help employees prepare for work, address physical stress early, improve movement behaviors, support return-to-work efforts, and identify opportunities to improve workplace ergonomics and workforce readiness. Services include movement coaching, injury triage, ergonomic guidance, wellness education, and early intervention.
Can Athletic Trainers help reduce workplace injuries?
Athletic Trainers support early intervention, employee education, ergonomic improvements, and workforce readiness initiatives. They help organizations identify physical demands, improve movement quality, encourage early reporting, and support employee health initiatives, all of which address factors that may contribute to workplace injuries and lost productivity.
If Athletic Trainers work with athletes, why would I hire them to support my employees?
Over a decade ago, employers sought a prevention model to lower injury claims, decrease workers' compensation spending, and guide employees in ergonomic, health, and wellness programs. The existing healthcare approach was reactive, leading to work stoppages, increased lost time, and often allowing discomfort to progress to injuries before they were addressed. CIPS Athletic Trainers continuously shape each individual, on-site or remotely, to perform with increased confidence through ergonomic coaching, early reporting, and guided return, ensuring every movement contributes to a safer workforce.
How does CIPS encourage early recognition of discomforts?
By being present, available, and relational, Athletic Trainers continuously educate employees on the importance of addressing any discomfort they experience, whether at work or at home. By screening, stretching, and applying OSHA-guided first aid principles early, aches never have to become injuries.
How does CIPS assist in returning injured employees to work?
Your Athletic Trainer is the best liaison between your employees, their injuries, physician care, physical therapy, and your workers' compensation team. By creating a back-to-work EMPOWER plan, your employee begins working with their Athletic Trainer as soon as possible, guiding them physically and emotionally back to work through one-on-one interactions, screenings, and rehabilitation.
Ergonomics
What is an Ergonomic Risk Assessment?
An Ergonomic Risk Assessment identifies physical demands, postures, forces, and movements that may contribute to discomfort, fatigue, or injury. The goal is to understand how work is performed and identify practical opportunities to reduce risk.
When should I conduct an Ergonomic Risk Assessment?
An Ergonomic Risk Assessment is helpful when employees report discomfort, injury trends begin to emerge, a task changes, new equipment is introduced, or leadership wants a better understanding of physical demands before injuries occur.
What is the difference between an Ergonomic Risk Assessment and a Physical Demands Analysis?
An Ergonomic Risk Assessment evaluates the risks associated with a task. A Physical Demands Analysis measures and documents the physical requirements of a job. Organizations often use both tools together to better understand work and workforce capabilities.
Can ergonomics reduce workers' compensation claims?
Ergonomic improvements can reduce exposure to physical risk factors and may contribute to fewer musculoskeletal injuries when combined with workforce training and employee engagement.
How does CIPS drive an ergonomic solution?
As Athletic Trainers learn more about employees and their job tasks, they also become familiar with the work environment and observe how employees use their bodies to perform their jobs. After addressing a discomfort or injury, this interaction naturally guides the Athletic Trainer in identifying ergonomic risks and developing mitigation strategies to prevent future discomfort or injury. Beyond assessment, the key is coaching employees to use their bodies safely, including functional movement, body mechanics, posture, and power zone training. With this training, employees can go about their days with ergonomic confidence. The Athletic Trainer can also develop an ergonomic committee within your organization to gain employee buy-in and spread information peer-to-peer.
CareerCare®
What is CareerCare®?
CareerCare® is CIPS's workforce readiness framework that combines ergonomic confidence, workplace athlete development, and individual coaching to help workers better manage the physical demands of their careers.
How does CareerCare® differ from a traditional wellness program?
Traditional wellness programs often focus on health education and participation incentives. CareerCare® focuses on improving workforce readiness through ergonomics, movement, exercise, nutrition, coaching, and early intervention strategies.
How will I know if the program is working?
During the discovery and planning phase, CIPS works with you to define your project identification document (PID), including the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) most important to your organization. Monthly reporting provides insight into program performance, covering work-related and non-work-related discomforts, avoidance of medical referrals, training and coaching activities, ergonomic risk identification and mitigation, and employee satisfaction. In the short term, expect more confident employees on the job. In the long term, increased retention and improved talent acquisition.
What if our injury numbers are good and we haven't had any incidents?
Discomforts are little accidents waiting to happen. Dehydration and fatigue are one incident away from a high cost. There is much more to safety than compliance and training. CIPS Athletic Trainers develop strong relationships with workplace athletes, founded on trust, objective advice, and subject-matter expertise, equipping every individual to move better on and off the worksite.
How do I know if my organization needs an Athletic Trainer?
Organizations often consider an Athletic Trainer when they experience recurring soft tissue injuries, physically demanding work, workforce readiness concerns, return-to-work challenges, or a desire to improve employee engagement around health and safety.
How does CIPS build a prevention-focused culture?
The most effective way to create a prevention-focused culture is to allow Athletic Trainers to build relationships while learning about the work your employees do each day. These interactions build trust. Instead of claiming to lower injury rates by a fixed percentage, CIPS takes a proactive approach: we commit to creating a more resilient workforce by leveraging sports medicine to reduce vulnerabilities, so safety leadership can face threats with confidence.