Yuri Kovach, Director of Operations and Training Academy at Krypteia Group International Canada (KGICA) sat down with Assistant Editor, Isabelle Crow, to explain the importance of evacuation signage and tailoring emergency response.
Yuri explained what makes KGI unique and how its goal has always been to ensure that the team works together in integration and not separation.
He pinpointed how having a team from a variety of diverse background and professions, ensures that the products and services they offer are practical, versus just looking great on a binder.
Our approach is always about finding the gaps that others miss.
What we share only with our best clients is that we deliberately challenge people’s thinking—not to confuse them, but to prepare them for the toughest situations.
We plant the seed early so that when an emergency strikes, they instinctively know what to do.
Just like we pass countless exit signs and fire extinguishers without noticing them, our signage ensures that when the critical moment comes, the response is automatic and precise.
Emergency signage needs to be quickly registered. When an incident happens, the majority of the public go into a state of shock and tune out- often forgetting how they should respond.
Yuri Kovach
Your emergency signage needs to be clear enough to be instantly recognised in a state of disarray.
Evacuation routes have to be accessed without any additional thinking required, or sense of specific direction – for example north.
They have to lead you to a nearest safe exit or its alternate.
The year-to-year service plan helps to offer peace of mind to the client, knowing that they don’t need to chase reviews or wonder when updates are going to be made.
We offer a routine to our clients- coming in, performing the work and offering support at every stage.
The other aspect of the year-to-year service plan is that it creates a safety culture in which we are ensuring compliance with the requirements of the fire codes and occupational health and safety acts.
Yuri Kovach
It takes time for organizations to change, our clients always find benefit in improving and becoming safer from year to year.
It’s 2025 and times are changing. I think right now, we are saturated with too much online content.
My team took a lot of these online courses as part of the research that we did into our own training and we found that they lacked depth and connectivity to the day-to-day work of our field.
On top of that, the online training space is often unregulated.
As a consumer, you rarely know what the content truly offers, what the actual learning goals are, or whether the trainees who complete the course walk away with real, applicable knowledge.
Too many programs prioritize convenience and volume over substance, leaving a gap between what is taught and what is needed in practice.
Let’s be honest, when you scroll through an online course, you’re not really registering the information.
Yuri Kovach
Next thing you know, you’re on slide six and haven’t learned anything.
Many courses end up being far more complex than necessary. Take first aid training as an example: the entire course may run for eight hours, but long sections are often dedicated to topics like the cardiovascular system.
While this knowledge has its place, it can feel overly detailed or even tedious for many learners, especially when their main goal is to be prepared to perform CPR.
At KGI, we’ve rethought this approach.
Our online training is designed to simplify the process by focusing on the essentials first – what people must know and can put into practice right away, while still offering the option to dive deeper for those who want to expand their understanding.
Yuri Kovach
This way, participants save time, build confidence in the core skills and have the opportunity to grow further if they choose.
The second part of each online training course is the physical practice, which is a mandatory requirement for every attendee. Theory alone is never enough.
The skills in our line of work must be applied in real-world scenarios.
As instructors, we are responsible for ensuring that learners not only understand the knowledge but can also execute the skills accurately, precisely, and safely.
This hands – on component guarantees that everything taught in theory translates into confident action.
First and foremost to protect the individual performing it, and secondly to safeguard the people they are trying to help.
Our philosophy is clear: if a student hasn’t learned – the instructor hasn’t taught.
This standard is what drives us to pair knowledge with practice, ensuring that every participant leaves not only informed, but capable
Standards are critically important. A trend we are currently seeing across industries is that standards are falling short.
New products are getting to the market and standards have not adjusted to them, so there is an immediate need to develop new standards in response to the innovation.
I think science and knowledge are much more advanced that the regulators are today. This means that creative solutions are needed to ensure that standards and maintained and met.
Yuri Kovach
Some countries are better than others at adapting to standards and regulations.
It is becoming impossible to ignore how products cannot be copied and pasted from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and client to client.
Modifications need to be made based on regulations and the specificities of a facility or client.
We divide our industries into several different fields and we believe that the service is very different for each one of them.
When we look at a corporate environment, there will be a group of people who have constant responsibility over health and safety even if it is not their day-to-day job such as fire wardens.
They will have responsibility during an emergency to take control and guide everyone to safety.
However, if you look at hospitality and tourism, people do not tend to care about safety as much because the focus is on creating a fun environment.
The staff are on their feet working, meaning that they can become tired and lose attention. They are often not trained in safety protocols, which poses a higher risk.
On the other hand, if we compare healthcare this is a completely different story because you are looking at a building where the majority of occupants will have mobility impairments, restricting their ability to evacuate.
Yuri Kovach
Similarly, medical care cannot stop when an emergency takes place. It’s not like in an office environment where you can turn off your computers and promptly evacuate.
A hospital might have 3,000 patients and 12 floors with different blocks and a variety of risks.
This means the Emergency Fire and Evacuation Plans not only require a different approach from the owner of the buildings, but also the management groups and occupants- even the fire departments and emergency services.
One of our main goals for the next few years is to expand our reach beyond the borders of North America.
We already have clients in Europe and the Middle East, but we are looking to broaden that clientele base and position ourselves as an industry leader. Develop skilled planners and trainers.
Another goal is to begin to implement tools using AI so that we can tailor our courses and interaction with customers to different countries and languages.
Language and cultural approach to fire and public safety are a huge barrier, so changing the way in which we interact with clients and their audience will be incredibly important.
Yuri Kovach
Finally, we want to continue to serve our clients, always putting them first and continuing to grow as a result.
