Training Resources – FAQs

Reasonable Efforts are the critical components of a solid alcohol management program which encourage responsible fan behavior and mitigate risk for venue operators with respect to alcohol.

TEAM trainer certification is a two (2) year period, except for Washington, DC where the certification period is three (3) years. Trainers may re-certify online every other certification period as long as they have certified at least 80 participants or trained a minimum of four (4) sessions. Click here to learn more about TEAM Trainer Certification.

TEAM employee certification is a three (3) year period, except for Maryland where the certification period is four (4) years. Employees may only re-certify by participating in live training session and passing the certification exam. Click here to learn more about Employee Certification.

The state of Maryland requires that we email or mail the certification results directly to the employees. Make sure your participant exams include a LEGIBLE address or email address entered on the back of the exam form. We cannot complete exam processing without it!

• Insurance claims and liability suits are reduced when facilities are trained in alcohol management.
• TEAM provides an independent third-party certification which ensures credibility, while also removing the administrative burden from the facility.
• TEAM reporting process tracks the training progress of each employee.

• Recognizing warning signs of impairment
• Understanding how the misuse of alcohol affects employees, guests, the facility and the community
• Managing alcohol effectively by working together as a team
• Demonstrating reasonable efforts to minimize liability when it comes to alcohol-related incidents
• Helping to prevent underage access to alcohol by checking IDs and intercepting pass-offs
• Helping to ensure compliance with state alcohol service laws

Trainers may login to the TEAM training website to view results for training sessions they have conducted, print certification cards and search for employees by name to determine if they are TEAM trained (even if they were trained by another trainer).

At any time, we are happy to generate a complete training report for any organization, any facility and any time period. Just send us your report request at info@teamcoalition.org.

TEAM offers volume discounts for employee certification for both in-person training and online training. Click here to see TEAM Training Prices. For all orders of 500 participant manuals or more, you will earn one complementary registration for a Train-the-Trainer workshop.

Approximately 8% of all exams received result in a failure. Often the failure is because the employee skipped a particular question and then filled in the answer to the next question in the wrong bubble. All following answers are now off by one. And then there are the exam forms we receive with no bubbles filled-in.

If your employees fail, we will email you a link to the online retake test. Simply forward the link to the employee who failed the exam in order to take the test again. The retake results will be available within 5 business days of the employee completing the online retake test.

TEAM participant manuals are available in English and Spanish.

TEAM offers the option for trainers to receive electronic-only certification cards in lieu of printing and mailing physical cards. Trainers who opt-in to this program will receive a $1 discount per manual for all future orders for their organization at their facility. Click here for the prices of all training products. Please note that once trainers sign up for electronic-only cards, all future sessions graded for the organization at the facility will be processed with electronic certification cards only. Printed cards may not be requested for any future sessions. For more information or to sign up for the program, send an email to info@teamcoalition.org.

Please allow at least 10 business days from the day TEAM Coalition receives your exams to the day you receive the results. Plan accordingly when planning your training classes and scheduling your staff to work. You will receive an email from TEAM on the day we receive your exams. That’s when the 10-day clock starts. If you do not receive that email within a week of sending us your exams, please call or email. Packages get lost. Please use a shipping service that provides a tracking number so we can follow the progress of the package. And please photocopy or scan the exams before shipping. If the package is lost, we can use the photocopies or scanned exams to grade them.

If you need your results sooner than 10 business days, we have a Rush Processing program. Annually, the first 3 rush processing requests per organization at each facility will be accommodated without a fee. A rush processing fee of $50 per session will be charged for requests 4 to 10. A $100 fee per session will be charged for requests 11 and beyond (hopefully not to infinity!).

Annually, the first 3 rush processing requests per organization at each facility will be accommodated without a fee. Rush processing fees for any requests beyond the first 3 are as follows.

• $50 per request for requests 4 to 10
• $100 per request for requests 11+

The clock re-starts on October 1st each year. That is the first day of the TEAM Coalition fiscal year.

Any participant exams received on photocopied forms will be invoiced at $20 each. The labor and time involved in grading photocopied exams is significant. It slows down the time to process all exams received. Please ensure you have enough TEAM Participant Manuals for your training session. Please Contact Us immediately if you do not have enough exams to allow all participants to take the certification test.

Please send all exams to the address below:

TEAM Coalition
1800 Diagonal Road
Suite 600, #1084
Alexandria, VA  22314
703-647-7430

Do not hold on to exams in order to send everything at once. Exams get lost and receiving 400 exams at once is more difficult to process on time than receiving 50 or 100 exams each week for a month. Also, it is strongly recommended that you photocopy or scan the exam forms before sending them. And please use a shipping service that provides a tracking number for the package. Sometimes packages get lost in transit. With the photocopies of the exams we can get the results processed. With the tracking number, at least we can following the progress of the shipment.

Please send the completed exams and the session evaluations. And please make sure that your participants did fill-in the bubbles at the bottom of the exam forms. A blank form is a guaranteed failure. You might be surprised how often it happens. Do NOT send the exam questions themselves. Make sure to perforate the exam packets. Recycle the questions and send us the completed exam forms in one pile and the evaluations in a separate pile. The form IDs at the bottom of the exam forms will ensure the evaluation responses will be linked to the exam answers.

Also, please send complete session rosters. We cannot process exams with an incomplete or missing session roster. The session roster tells us the location, trainer name(s), date and times of the training and the accounts and facilities represented by the people you have trained. Please send exams clipped to their corresponding session roster. Click here to download a blank session roster.

The ScanTron scanner will accept blue and black ink in addition to pencil. The scanner will not accept red, green or purple ink. Pencil is preferred only if mistakes are completely erased. Answer fields with 2 or more bubbles filled-in with mistakes crossed out will force the scanner to stop for a manual override. That slows down processing for everyone. Please consider providing your employees with pencils with erasers for the exam to make processing faster for everyone.

Social Security Numbers and Date of Birth are required fields for a small number of states so we recommend that your employees fill in the Date of Birth field or Social Security Number fields correctly. These fields help to identify people in a database of more than 700,000 records. The data is never sold. Click here to see our privacy statement. The sensitive data is never shared with anyone other than the trainers who conducted the training of those individuals. If employees do not want to share this information, then please make sure they leave those fields blank. Putting an “X” across the fields or filling in all the bubbles will force the scanner to stop for a manual override and slow down processing for everyone.