While it can be easy to learn and implement a safety program, thre is little question that being a safety officer or safety engineer is not a career path that anyone off the street can step in and do. Much like doctors and accountants and engineers, being a safety officer is a specialized position that takes special and specific training in order to be functional at the job – and even more continuing education to excel at the work of promoting workplace safety.
While there has started to become global safety standards for workers no matter what country they work in, there hasn’t yet been a global standard for safety-officer training, in which safety professionals are all taught the same foundational principles about occupational health and safety so anyone can work anywhere and utilize the same safety protocols and frameworks.
Thanks to the work of International Network for Safety and Health Practitioner Organizations (INSHPO), the idea of having standardized safety-professional training and education worldwide is a step closer to reality.
At a recent safety conference in Canada, INSHPO revealed its next-to-last version of a global capability framework for safety-officer education and training that is designed to help human-resources professionals effectively assess and hire safety professionals, and provide interactive web-based tools to help professionals get the continuing education they need, and have resources available to them so they can do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
The final stage of the framework is being discussed now, and it is expected to be revealed publicly at the 2017 World Congress meeting in Singapore this fall. INSHPO is a global entity with members from 14 occupational health and safety organizations around the world, which covers many industrialized and developing countries and their related businesses in many verticals.
This framework is not intended to be an absolute regulation or standard for all training or education, but it is meant to be a foundational guideline for ensuring that a safety officer or an applicant have the necessary training and education to effectively do the job for which he or she is being considered. As with law or accountancy or public relations or engineering, having a defined educational framework – including a certification process for continuing education – leads to well-qualified people who get promoted more easily and get paid more than others in similar professions but without the formal groundwork.
You can visit the INSHPO website and learn more about th eorganizatio and the gloabal capability framework.