Meet Robbie O: Experience Behind AWCC’s Forklift Training
A training course can have excellent facilities, quality equipment and well-developed resources, but ultimately it is the person standing in front of the students who brings the training to life.
As Australian Well Control Centre expands its High Risk Work training capability, Robbie O brings nine years of forklift training experience to AWCC, strengthening the practical experience behind our delivery of TLILIC0003 – Licence to Operate a Forklift Truck.
For Robbie, forklift training is about much more than teaching someone how to manoeuvre a machine through an assessment course.
It is about developing an operator who understands what is happening around them.
Nine Years of Developing Operators
Over nine years of delivering forklift training, Robbie has worked with people arriving with very different levels of experience.
Some have spent years around forklifts and material-handling operations. Others may be getting behind the controls for the first time.
That creates one of the challenges of quality High Risk Work training: recognising what each student already knows while ensuring that every candidate develops the knowledge, practical skills and safe operating behaviours required of a competent forklift operator.
Experience also teaches a trainer something that cannot be gained simply by reading a training package — where operators commonly make mistakes.
Forklift incidents continue to demonstrate the consequences of poor visibility, instability, excessive speed, inadequate separation from pedestrians and incorrect load handling. Workplace Health and Safety Queensland identifies each of these as significant forklift risks.
They are therefore issues that deserve more than a passing reference during training.
Building Situational Awareness
One of the most important skills an operator can develop is situational awareness.
Before moving a load, an operator should already be thinking about the condition and capacity of the forklift, the load itself, the route of travel, surface conditions, overhead hazards, blind spots, pedestrians and other mobile plant.
The national assessment requirements for TLILIC0003 specifically require candidates to consider factors such as surface suitability, collision risks, weather conditions, operational checks and workplace procedures. Assessment must occur in workplace operational situations or realistic simulated workplace conditions — and simulators cannot be used for assessment.
That practical focus aligns strongly with Robbie’s approach to training.
Students need time operating the equipment, handling loads and learning to recognise how seemingly small decisions can affect the stability and safety of an operation.
A forklift may be commonplace, but it is still powerful mobile plant. Even at low speeds, the consequences of getting an operation wrong can be severe.
Recent Queensland incidents continue to reinforce that point. In 2026, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland issued safety alerts following workers being struck by forklifts and another incident involving pipe falling during forklift operations. The regulator again highlighted controls including pedestrian separation, exclusion zones, appropriate load handling, visibility and effective traffic management.
Experience Joining the AWCC Team
Robbie’s arrival also represents the next stage in AWCC’s continued expansion beyond our traditional oil and gas training capability.
The same principles that underpin well control, confined space, working at heights and other safety-critical training apply equally to High Risk Work: understand the hazard, understand the equipment, follow the process and never allow familiarity to replace discipline.
For AWCC, having a trainer with nine years of forklift training experience provides an important foundation as we grow this area of the business.
For Robbie, the objective remains straightforward.
The measure of successful training is not simply whether somebody walks away having completed a course.
It is whether they return to their workplace as a safer, more capable and more aware operator.
That is the standard AWCC wants associated with its forklift training — and the experience Robbie brings to the training floor will play an important part in achieving it.