5.3.3 Training, education, testing and validation
An audited plan has not been proved to work. It has simply been checked for major omissions. The next stages are to train people in the plan's contents and procedures, and to validate the plan. The relationship between ‘training and education’ and ‘plan validation and testing’ is a bit ambiguous. It could be argued that it is not worth putting a lot of resources into training until the plan has been validated. On the other hand, a plan cannot be properly validated unless the people validating it are familiar with the contents. It is a bit like the perennial argument about which comes first, the chicken or the egg! The answer is possibly that training the validation team should be regarded as a pilot exercise. They then validate the plan, and once any essential changes have been made, the rest of the workforce is trained.