Hi SafetyforConstruction.

Your first post here so welcome to the Forums.

You indicate that you have been thinking about 25 potential question and cite four of them.

I would be somewhat surprised if Q2 were asked in the way you have written it if the interview is in the UK or Ireland - unless perhaps for a multinational based in the Americas - and suspect that this Q might be the product of the imagination of an AI helper with a US bias.

The title of your post says that this would be an interview for a "Graduate" position so you need to think about what an employer might reasonably expect of someone fresh out of higher education OR someone applying for such a role on the basis of their previous experience. If you are in the former of these categories, you need to think what someone from the latter might offer that you cannot - and vice versa.

If faced with competent interviewers I think you will struggle if you rehearse your answers too much first because the QQ asked will end up being slightly different to the ones for which you have prepared your answers, but more because of what you have already pointed to - the supplementary QQ which are very difficult to predict and which even the interviewers probably won't know until they get your answer to a primary question.

You haven't given us a synopsis of your background nor why you might apparently think that the construction industry is the sector to target, but I would be thinking about what understanding of risks you have gained from whatever work you have done in the past and from life in general.

Even the "I got an electric shock when I did something rather silly when I was 10"!!! With hindsight you might already have come to the conclusion that is wasn't actually so "silly" in the circumstances or you might come to that view with more experience.

What you do need to understand is that whilst some interviewers will still be majoring on the Safety issues, the more enlightened should be giving more focus to occupational health risks.

If you are fresh out of Uni having done a degree in H&S management or similar title, or about to graduate, you should already have a feel for the relative statistics for accidents v occupational ill health. If not, time to do some research starting with the HSE website. You are much more likely to take them in if you look them up than if I quote numberss here.

By the way, my answer to your Q1 would be substantially different to your draft and I think that Q4 would be an unreasonable Q to be asking someone who potentially has no work experience - always assuming that the interviewers are setting a reasonably level playing field for all their applicants.

Good luck, Peter

Hi SafetyforConstruction

OK Question 1 - before I even considered working out how to put together an audit strategy for my own employer I would want to get a feel for how the organisation ticks.

Then I would want to consider the scope of previous audits - so have they been audits against systems, against legal requirements (and perhaps best practice) or possibly a mix of both? Lots of audits focus on systems which might pass the test of covering all the points in the relevant ISO or other standard, but that doesn't mean that the systems are necessarily fit for purpose.

Further lots of audits (and inspections) tend to focus on the Safety risks that are easily seen as being liable to result in personal injury to one or two people.

Which means that such audits miss out on a lot of other risks that are perhaps at least as important:

1. The low probability, high consequence scenarios that could cause mass harm in the short term - you mention the potential of overloading and I wonder why you would wish to place faith that the engineers are always getting it right!

Arguably the greatest failure of "CDM" has been lack of focus on the front end duty holders - Clients, Designers and the Co-ordinator required by the parent EC Directive, named as the Principal Designer in CDM 2015.

These duty holders don't always get it right. I used to work for a major design practice!

AND, of course, it would be unreasonable to home in site workers for overloading a structure if they are not given sufficient information about how much loading is OK. What does it say in e.g. the CDM Pre Construction Information and site drawings?!?!

2. Occupational health (and, if within your remit environmental) risks where the harm tends to be longer term, but which rarely show up on whatever indicators of performance are discussed at Board level.

Slightly different if you are putting together an audit strategy as a consultant to a different orga nisation as you have to make some educated guesses as to where the room for improvement may be and make proposals based on various assumptions as no audit can cover every aspect of a business unless given unlimited budget and time.

With your degree in EH, it is very likely that you could home in on issues that have not received as much attention as they should in previous audits. So, this might be something you could use as a selling point in interview, as long as you also indicate that you want to learn about the basics that the interviewers are perhaps more interested in.