Do I need workplace violence training too?

No, and treating them as one is the most common compliance gap I find. They come from two separate statutes with different triggers, different content and different clocks.

Harassment prevention sits in Government Code 12950.1 and applies to employers with five or more employees: one hour for employees, two for supervisors, every two years. Workplace violence prevention sits in Labor Code 6401.9, added by SB 553 and enforceable since July 1, 2024, and it applies to most California employers regardless of the harassment threshold. It lists six exemptions in subdivision (b)(2): health care operations covered by the healthcare standard, employers that comply with that standard, certain state corrections facilities, certain law enforcement agencies, teleworkers in locations you do not control, and workplaces with fewer than 10 employees present at one time that are closed to the public. Several are conditional on compliance with the injury and illness prevention program rule, so read the text.

Doing one does not satisfy the other. A Cal/OSHA inspector asking for your violence prevention records will not accept a harassment training roster.

Every year, not every two. Initial training when the plan is first established, annually after that, and again whenever a new hazard is identified or the plan changes.

That annual cadence catches people out. An employer who trained in mid 2024 to meet the original deadline and has not trained since is two cycles behind, not one.

Not really. SB 553 requires training on your own written plan, which has to be site specific. A generic course can teach awareness, but the statute ties training to the plan, the hazards in your actual workplace, and the reporting path your actual employees would use.

This is the part vendors gloss over. A recording that explains workplace violence in the abstract does not tell your warehouse staff which door to use, who to call, or how the incident log works. If you have not written the plan, there is nothing compliant to train on yet.

A record of every workplace violence incident, kept separate from the plan itself, with the detail the statute calls for: what happened, where, the type of violence, the circumstances, and what was done afterward.

Employers who never have an incident still need the log to exist. An empty log is evidence of a working system. A missing log is evidence of nothing.

If you do not have the plan yet, start with a written prevention plan. Write the plan before you book the training, because the training is training on the plan. Then run both sessions and keep both rosters, because they prove two different things to two different agencies.

If you are starting from zero, the order is: plan, then violence prevention training, then check when harassment prevention is next due. The California training requirement checker will tell you what applies at your headcount, and the full guide lays both mandates side by side.

Need both sessions delivered live?

I deliver harassment prevention and workplace violence prevention as real sessions rather than recordings, and I will tell you on a consult if you only need one of them.