Migna Safety Solutions

Safety Management · Self-Paced · about 40 min total

Incident Investigation & Root Cause Analysis

Intermediate · Course MIG-SM-202

Running an investigation that finds why the conditions allowed the incident, rather than stopping at who made the mistake — evidence, interviewing, causal analysis, and corrective actions that hold.

Ver este curso en español

This is a Migna Safety Solutions course with a Migna certificate of completion. It is not OSHA Outreach Training and does not include a Department of Labor card.

Most workplace incident investigations end at the same conclusion — the employee made a mistake — and produce the same corrective action: retrain the employee. The incident then happens again to somebody else, because nothing about the conditions changed. This course is for the person who runs the investigation. It covers what an investigation is actually for and why blame defeats it; securing the scene and collecting the four kinds of evidence before they perish; interviewing witnesses without contaminating their memory; causal analysis methods and how to know when you have reached a root cause rather than stopped early; why human error is a starting point and not a finding; writing corrective actions against the hierarchy of controls with an owner, a date, and a verification; and treating near misses as the cheap version of the same investigation. It also covers the one place OSHA mandates investigation outright — 1910.119(m) for process safety — and how the investigation relates to, but is not the same as, your recordkeeping decision. Issues a Migna certificate of completion.

What you are buying

30 min
Enforced seat time
3
Modules
9
Lessons
3
Interactive exercises
27
Quiz questions

Seat time is enforced on our servers. The clock is calculated from signed progress events rather than in your browser, so it cannot be sped up — a certificate that states 30 minutes of training means it. The 42 minutes shown above is that gate plus the quizzes and final exam, which are not on the clock.

This certificate does not expire on a clock

The standard behind this course sets no fixed retraining interval, so we do not print one. Retraining is triggered by events instead — a new hazard, a changed process, or an observed deficiency. Your employer or insurer may set their own interval, which is a real obligation but not a federal one.

Written against 10 published standards

Every citation below appears in the course content and is checked against the current text of the rule before publication.

  • 1904.33(b)(1)
  • 1904.35
  • 1904.35(b)(1)(i)
  • 1904.39
  • 1910.119(m)
  • 1910.119(m)(1)
  • 1910.119(m)(2)
  • 1910.119(m)(3)
  • 1910.119(m)(4)
  • 1910.119(m)(5)

What You Will Be Able To Do

The course is built to reach these, and the quizzes are written to confirm them.

  • State the purpose of an incident investigation and distinguish it from assigning blame
  • Secure a scene and collect evidence, including interviewing witnesses without leading them
  • Apply a root cause method to move from the immediate cause to the system that allowed it
  • Write corrective actions that are specific, assigned and verifiable
  • Describe why near misses are investigated and how they are captured

What's Covered

  1. Module 1: What an Investigation Is For, and Getting the Facts

    • Purpose, and Why Blame Defeats It
    • Securing the Scene and Collecting Perishable Evidence

  2. Module 2: Finding Cause

    • Interviewing Without Contaminating the Account
    • Causal Analysis: Getting Past the First Answer

  3. Module 3: Corrective Actions and Near Misses

    • Corrective Actions That Actually Hold
    • Near Misses, and How the Investigation Relates to the Log