HI Hall900056 

Thanks for your input, quoted in Arial font below, with my comments in Times New Roman:

It’s amazing how IOSH continually fail to listen to their highly qualified members, H&S is a unique role, your supposed to be the knowledge of all things, be professional, yet your membership body hasn’t a clue what you actually do.

Agreed, it is amazing, UNLESS the focus of the Senior Leadership team, with little, if any dissent from either the Board of Trustees AND the no longer elected Council and not really elected Presidential Team, is on IOSH's commerial arms.

Which does appear to be the case though the accounts for IOSH and its commercial arms are far from transparent, so that it is impossible to e.g. make an estimate as to how much "IOSH" spends on e.g. developing a new product and marketing it, before a commercial arm then delivers and can be seen to be making a profit in doing so.

If you were to hire a training company to do a bespoke training course for say 20 people for a day, then you could expect that training company to charge not only for the day delivering (+ some travel time, if face to face) + some preparation time before the course, then some time for analysis and production of documentation to confirm the delegates' attendance. HOWEVER, the biggest single chunk of any fee would be for the course development. If genuinely bespoke then at least three times as long to develop as to develop, usually much longer.

Which means that it is important to know how much time IOSH does require to allocate to course development AND if the commercial arm is to be on a level playing field for all these associated costs to be allocated against that commercial arm. 

If there is any hint that such overheads costs are being absorbed by the Charity, then the numbers are not in any way a reflection of how profitable the commercial arms ACTUALLY are.

• They expect 30 hours of CPD updates! When you’ve been at the job over 30 years

Assuming your role is challenging, then if you understand what CPD should mean as against how it is often presented, then at any stage of one's career, 30 hours CPD a year should not be that much hassle. I

If you think of CPD as everything you learn that will help you to do your current or future role better, whether at work or not, then every time someone asks for advice and you (perhaps as part of a team) have to do some research to come up with a proportionate solution, then the time that you spend LEARNING can be counted as CPD - so it should NOT be all about attending events or reading OSH publications.

• They changed the title of a GRADIOSH to a very downgraded name.

Which has clearly been problematic on multiple counts and was never a proposals backed by a clear rationale.

• They took control of our local committees who used to be run by chartered member, these were great, regular meetings & an abundance of experienced professionals, but no, IOSH had to control these with a regional IOSH employee who knows absolutely nothing about H&S & no qualifications.

Agreed. 

Most, if not all Branches used to have a Branch Education Officer who was the go to in terms of helping those up their learning curve and up the IOSH ladder.

As someone who spends a lot of time mentoring OSH professionals I can see the impact of the loss of those BEOs along with the much better networking that Branches (and Groups) offered with plenty of authority to do their own thing - so the narrative was less strictly controlled by the Party Line.

• Now the forum is next on their list, it’s always been a useful source for so many to gain advice especially if your new.

Writing was on the wall before the last Moderators meeting the person spec set out in the Forum Rules resigned in 2018. Consistent lack of any TLC from IOSH to support the Forums and keep out trolls (in the past) and bots (now).

I have to agree with everyone else, what is the point of being a member!

My primary reason for continuing with Membership - Retired with CPD which means annual hassle AND a higher subscription than if I ditched the CPD - is due to consideration for those of my mentees who are IOSH Members and have to face e.g. Blueprint. 

One of my mentees who works outside the UK and in a business that mostly follows US OSHA rules asked me a question some years ago in terms of their development path. Which should they prioritise:

1. Rejoining IOSH

2. Doing what was needed to get Certifiified Safety Practitioner status from the BCSP

3. Upgrading from MIIRSM to FIIRSM?

Without identifying my mentee, I thought that IOSH might offer an answer so I put the question to someone in the IOSH Senior Leadership Team.

Not even an attempt to explain why Option 1 was the way to go. No answer whatsoever.

Which perhaps says something about how important IOSH now views maintaining and increasing Membership numbers.

In recent years the rate of increase in IOSH Membership numbers has declined - probably a case that IOSH was gaining marginally more new Members than the number it was losing who were probably skewed towards higher grades of Membership.

However, the latest IOSH Annual Report indcates (by analysis of figures quoted by IOSH in previous years) that between 31 March 2024 and the same date this year, total IOSH Membership actually went down by about 600.

BUT at the same time numbers of IOSH staff continued to grow. 

So what are they all doing?

Edited by user 31 December 2025 17:33:30(UTC)  | Reason: Font issue