Hi El
Since nobody has answered I will try and get the ball rolling.
There is no easy answer to your question!
First, I think YOU need to consider what you think are your strengths and weaknesses.
But also, what “opportunities” you might be seeking. Perhaps a different role with your current employer, may be somewhere else, possibly most sensibly both lines of potential progress.
If you consider what will enhance your CV it could be a good indicator of what will be good for your career development.
AND when it comes to the CV for an OSH professional, the readers tend to split roughly equally into those who like box tickers and those who want to understand how a candidate would add value to how their organisation operates.
For the first of these types of readers, having lots of evidence that you have been on training helps to tick THEIR boxes.
For the others they probably want to know HOW you have put the training into practice.
Plenty of opportunities around with organisations with both types of CV readers. You have decide what sort of organisation you want to work for!
All too much of the time people go on training course, never have the chance to put the training into practice, which means that 5 years later, they will have forgotten most, if not all, of what they MIGHT have learnt at the time.
For both camps a certificate saying that someone has been on an ISO management systems (45001, 14001 or 9001) Auditor (better still Lead Auditor) course is a bonus particularly if that training has been delivered by an organisation with the imprimatur of e.g. IRCA and not TrainingsRUs!
If you haven’t done this recently I suggest you dig out your CV and ask whether it tells the reader how you have added demonstrable value in what you have done in your current and previous roles.
“Demonstrable” probably doesn’t mean making claims that can be easily challenged about e.g. “I reduced the number of Lost Time Injury accidents or LTIFR by 50% in a year”.
…though that might easily work for the box ticker type of readers.
The other readers are likely to grill you on your claim if you get to interview. First they might challenge the basis for the numbers to see which of the many ways tried and tested ways of manipulating the data you may have deployed.
If you pass that test, next a competent interviewer will want to delve into WHO was actually responsible for some significant improvement in the numbers as it is very unlikely to have resulted from your own efforts alone. Far more likely to have come about from e.g. line managers taking better ownership of H&S and not leaving that to the Safety Bod. So, a better claim for YOU would be about how you have influenced the line managers to manage – in effect what you have done to help the TEAM do better!
But also, WHY this has come about. Organisations change and some of the changes SHOULD themselves bring about reductions in accidents and accident rates. If a manufacturing organisation invests in replacing humans with robots, then naturally you should expect less accidents (whilst introducing some new risks to be considered and managed).
Similarly, the budget holder might be reluctant to spend £10k on improving the guarding of a machine so that less accidents will occur and/or that noise exposure will be reduced. However, that same budget holder might be entirely prepared to spend five times as much if they are going to get a return on investment from increased productivity within say 5 years and you get the safer machinery with less noise exposure, in effect, as a free bonus.
You indicate that you work for a local authority but that doesn’t provide an indication of the scope of your role.
You could cover the whole range of things that an LA covers or you might be allocated to e.g. social care or highways, each very important but possibly limiting YOUR chance to stretch your competence.
So, perhaps if in a box you might get much more CPD from asking for chances within your LA to look at other functions than from ANY course that you could attend.
You mentioned “fire” and I think that perhaps you should be cautious in that area.
Given all the new legislation and guidance coming out post Grenfell and other incidents I think it is reasonable to expect that e.g. “fire risk assessors” will be much more under the spotlight at a personal level than has been usual in the past.
This is not dissimilar to the role of the Principal Designer in the third iteration of CDM. HSE finally took off the gloves and made it clear in the legislation that they wanted this role to be done by people with qualifications and experience in actually designing and constructing structures rather than the OSH professionals who can look for missing toe-boards or people not wearing PPE.
But which OSH professionals may struggle with advising on something as apparently simple as deciding whether permanent edge protection for the roof on a new building is a good idea and when it is NOT.
So back to fire, is some training course going to give you the competence to assess whether the cladding on a building is fit for purpose, and whether the M&E installations could be such as to accelerate the spread of fire and/or restrict smoke venting to a safe place?
If the answer is NO, but some employer will then make YOU responsible you would be walking on hot coals if relying on a “course”.
You could go on a course to make you competent to inspect the doors to a tenant’s own home in a block of flats, but that would probably be a waste of your skill set as a CMIOSH.
Now I think there are four areas of training that you might consider, but each with the proviso that you will get opportunities to quickly put the training into practice so to reinforce what you learn:
- Presentation skills – OSH professionals get asked to do lots of training and other presentations, some in more formal settings than others and some OSH professionals don’t do this very well, e.g. ending up with the proverbial Death by Powerpoint!
- Time Management – if you aspire to a management role, there will come a time when you want to ask for more resources. Any competent decision maker will be asking you for the business case for those extras resources, so if you can’t demonstrate you are using existing resources well, then the answer to your plea for more SHOULD be NO.
- ….and, if you are not reasonably adept at looking at the way H&S numbers are presented to management and others, often in ways that they have always been presented then may be some training in statistical analysis to enable you to work out WHY what is currently being done is cosmetic and what instead would actually add value.
- “Management” training, where the proviso is perhaps most important. If this training is offered on the basis that “some promotion might be in the offing in a few years time”, then by the time that chance arrives, you will probably have forgotten most of what you learnt!
Good luck, Peter