Hi Justin,

It sounds like you already have a strong foundation to build on 30 years’ experience is hugely valuable in a health and safety role.

A few steps that could help make you more attractive to future employers:

1. Leverage your site credibility – Your practical knowledge and experience will be highly respected by both operatives and management. When moving into H&S, emphasise how you bridge the gap between the office and the site.

2. Learn to translate site experience into reports and evidence – Employers value H&S professionals who can document findings clearly for audits, incident investigations, and client reporting. Any vision should be factual and not an opinion.

3. Gain exposure to various aspects of H&S by shadowing your current company’s HSEQ team during audits, and consider shadowing other teams that have different approaches.

4. Network within the profession – IOSH branch meetings are great, mainly the face-to-face ones. Networking often opens up opportunities ; )

5. Consider short specialist courses – Topics like Temporary Works Awareness, CDM Regulations, or behavioural safety can make you stand out when applying for roles in construction.

Best of luck with your October exam.

Good morning Justin

Welcome to the Forums.

Good advice already given.

My first question for you is to check whether the course you are doing is recognised by IOSH as meeting the academic criteria for TechIOSH and/or CertIOSH, which translates to Levels 3 and 6 on the European Qualifications Framework?

It is entirely possible that you are doing a course which DOES meet one of those standards but hsa not been accredited by IOSH.

If so, you might think about a need to try and influence the course provider to apply for accreditation (which means time and money for your provider to spend) OR think about whether you ALSO want to do courses that IOSH does accept as the academic criteria needed to climb up the Membership ladder - also experience criteria, but you ought to be able to jump through those hoops without much difficulty.

Of course the word "think" doesn't mean "do"! Could be entirely reasonable for you to choose not to try and jump over any hurdles that IOSH sets. You have a huge wealth of experience that gives you transferable skills and there will be opportunities for you in roles with more H&S as the focus, without that much need to worry about what letters you can put after your name. YOU can make the decisions about your goals.

Good luck, Peter

That's a fascinating suggestion from Holliday - everything in it is clearly true and the argument is logical, but I'd never made that link to think taking a course in advertising and marketing would be helpful in that way.

Hi Justin

Following on what Holliday had to say.

I did something similar, except that the title of the course was different - "Presentation Skills" but the purpose was largely similar - I think 12 of use from different disciplines mostly there to enable us to market better.

An intenseive weekend away followed by a two hour one to one with the presenter.

It was really the 2 hour session that made it all come together for me.

"You have investigated all those accidents and more. So what you have to do to get your message across is to give them Stories, Stories, Stories. If they can understand the Stories then they will remember the underlying messages behind the Stories." [That's the abridged version of that particular Story!]

Now, hopefully (!), you can't talk about that many accidents, but the near misses (and other things that COULD have happened) are just as good as the basis for "Stories" which don't all need to come from your experience at work.