The TSB’s 2025 Watchlist recognizes that fatigue isn’t a niche problem, it’s a pattern: 119 occurrences since the 1990s across air, marine, and rail document this problem.  Scheduling and hours-of-service rules are necessary but insufficient.  People still work tired, may not feel safe to report it, and sometimes can’t step away when they are unfit.

The fix is training plus an evolution of sleep and fatigue culture.  The TSB states:

“Effective fatigue management and the reduction of associated risks require profound changes in attitudes and behaviours, at both management and operational levels. This can only be accomplished through sustained awareness training and the implementation of fatigue management plans that encourage employers and employees to take responsibility for preventing fatigue-related occurrences. To support this cultural shift, the issue of fatigue management in transportation will remain on the Watchlist until several actions are taken in Canada’s air, marine, and rail transportation sectors."

Training to elevate sleep and fatigue awareness to advanced levels and a culture that prioritizes sleep and welcomes work stoppages due to fatigue should be a requirement, not a suggestion.  Fatigue isn’t a checkbox hazard, it’s a systems problem that shows up across roles, schedules, and sectors.  A one-hour e-learning can introduce terminology to your workforce, but it cannot build the competence your crews and supervisors need to prevent fatigue, recognize risk in real time, challenge unsafe plans, or redesign schedules to improve biological compatibility.  Advanced training is necessary because the conditions that influence fatigue, like sleep physiology, duty patterns, commuting, sleep environments, lifestyles, and organizational culture, interact in complex ways.  Your workforce must be able to recognize those interactions and understand how to mitigate their effects before and during work, not just recall generic “do’s and don’ts.”  This cannot be accomplished without depth in training.

Advanced training also builds data literacy.  Your front-line staff and planners should be able to decipher the Fatigue Risk Factors [link to fatigue risk factors list in FMN without need to be a member] inherent in work schedules, understand what bio-mathematical tools can (and cannot) tell them, and connect leading indicators such as fatigue reports, overtime patterns and human performance drops, to influential conditions and initiatives to reduce the risks.  This will equip your workforce to move beyond hours-of-service compliance toward genuine fatigue risk management.  It also enables a credible challenge culture where everyone can articulate why a plan is risky in operational terms and work together to reduce the risk.

Finally, depth in training matters for your sleep and fatigue culture.  Advanced training turns fatigue awareness into daily practice by giving your workforce the skills and language to prioritize sleep, spot risk early, and act without fear.  Advanced training helps your workforce understand the biological necessity of sleep, learn how to plan for sleep, properly time fatigue countermeasures, and call a stop when alertness drops.  It can also help your supervisors learn to reward those decisions and treat fatigue reports as leading indicators to fix, not problems to hide.  Over time, this builds a culture where adequate sleep is a shared operational requirement, not a personal luxury, where stopping work due to fatigue is praised as sound risk management, and where reporting fatigue consistently triggers learning, schedule adjustments, and visible follow-through.

The TSB’s 2025 Watchlist is published here:  https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/surveillance-watchlist/2025.html

The fatigue management Watchlist issue is discussed here: https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/surveillance-watchlist/multi-modal/2025/multimodal-03.html