Competence matters
June 1st 2007 The BSIF believes it is now important that clients of safety professionals and employers of safety specialists should have a more simple and accurate process to evaluate the people they are to engage to provide them with safety advice.
As in all professions, there are excellent practitioners and some who lack the necessary skills and experience. With marketing, legal and financial advice, the company might suffer but when it comes to health and safety the consequences of poor judgments can be much more serious.
It has always been the case that anyone engaging professional services has needed to use much care and research to ensure that they are likely to get good advice and value. Whether it is marketing, legal, accounting or safety advice that is being sought, there is little in the way of independent, transparently visible competence information available to the prospective client.
In general, the better provider of professional information will provide a CV outlining their track record, but many recruitment decisions are based on a mix of recommendations from friends, membership of a professional institution and/or the interpersonal chemistry established through interview – all without one vital piece of information – can this person do the job? There have been some moves towards establishing a competence standard and, because definition is not easy, these have usually been generated as applicable to specific functional operations. Unfortunately, the majority of health and safety professionals do not operate continuously in a fixed environment and it would assist enormously if a generic competence standard could be available for safety professionals, albeit that specific environmental experience might also be highly relevant.
Such a standard will help everybody – the safety professional evidencing compliance would immediately be in a better position to sell his/her skills and the client would have a meaningful basis on which to judge the prospective recruit’s ability to perform. The BSIF will continue its objective towards a UK recognised competence standard for Safety Professionals and is actively engaged with other stakeholders to ensure that when it is available, it is acceptable on a national basis in much the same way as the legal and financial professions operate. It would be counterproductive if the possibility of vested interests in respect of membership incomes were permitted to corrupt the ways in which safety professional competence is evaluated. More articles from British Safety Industry Federation: | 
