Posted By Edel i am a health and safety consultant for a small company. they asked me about providing hr services. i told the two are closely linked, health and safety is all about managing people etc. i studied a bit of employment law in college, i dont know whether i am capable to provide hr services? is anyone in a similar situation as me? what issues will i be dealing with?

Posted By Kieran J Duignan As I'm a chartered member of both the CIPD and the IOSH, I combine the roles of HR and OSH consultant. To give you an idea of some of the tasks you might have to undertake as a HR consultant, they could include assessing candidates for a director post, conducting a formal disciplinary process for two employees fighting at work (and dealing with an allegation that one of them was under the influence of drugs at the time), resolving a dispute about maternity pay, chairing a working task on performance appraisal and replying to complaints of managers about your alleged failures to come up with suitable candidates for a vacancy in a software engineering role critical to the most important contract of the business. All in a day's work but there's more to it than meets the eye, or ear. So, perhaps you should enrol and become a corporate member of the CIPD before you make your decision?

Posted By Kieran J Duignan John I smiled to read your reference to redundancy counselling. You may smile to read that I spent about 11 years where 60% of my time was on redundancy counselling when it was still an overwhelming social (as well as personal) shock to those involved.... I continue to hope that well-designed 'coaching' may become common ground between the best practices in HR and OSH before too long.....so maybe Edel may find appropriate engagement in HR/OSH where coaching is seen as an appropriate way to conduct both areas of intervention.

Posted By paul cormack Edel I'm with Keiran on this, and hold both CMIOSH and FCIPD myself. The two fields have considerable overlap, and you can have real opportunity to shape the "human" side of the business. Speak to your local careers advice centre, or have a look at www.cipd.co.uk to research further. Good luck with it.

Posted By Mark Simpson One of your objectives as HR manager will be to make the safety consultants job more difficult, so unless your into self harming, politely decline would be my advice. If you are still undecided, punch yourself in the face & see if you enjoy it. MS

Posted By Paul Devlin God Im depressed now I didnt realise people got paid for "HR". I've been a trade union rep at various stages for years and do all of the above for free. Where did I go wrong? Now looking for employmentin joint HR/H&S field if pay is right!