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Call goes out for new generation of safety and health professionals

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Call goes out for new generation of safety and health professionals

Workplace safety experts advising the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration will tackle the persistent and deeply concerning problem of a pending shortage of occupational safety and health professionals — an effort that employers must be actively involved in, according to stakeholders.

David Michaels, assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health, has tasked the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health with coming up with specific recommendations on how OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health can encourage young people to enter the field.

This effort was prompted by the challenge posed by an aging workforce experiencing an increasing number of retirements, according to Mr. Michaels’ June 15 charge to the committee, which will begin gathering information about the workforce challenges over the next three months.

NIOSH has tracked the supply and demand of the occupational safety and health workforce for decades, with more than 48,000 professionals in this field, according to the last assessment commissioned by the institute in 2011. About 59% of this workforce was primarily safety professionals, and employers expected 10% of these professionals to retire within the year following the survey, according to the survey.

Employers expected to hire about 25,000 additional occupational safety and health professionals in the five years following the survey, but occupational safety and health programs graduated about 2,845 new professionals at the bachelor’s degree or higher in 2011 and expected to graduate just under 13,000 professionals in the following five years, according to the survey.

Within the American Society of Safety Engineers, the average age of its professional members is 54, said Thomas Cecich, president-elect of the Park Ridge, Illinois-based society.

“We clearly have a graying of the profession that we see as an existential issue for ASSE as a member organization, but we also see it as a serious public issue in terms of not having qualified safety professionals at organizations,” he said. “It’s certainly supply and demand, but we’re also worried that if we don’t have an adequate supply of competent professionals, there will be openings for (incompetent) people.”

One way to attract youngsters to the profession is to highlight the high salaries associated with these positions, particularly given the competition among employers to retain these skilled workers, said Dr. William Bunn, a physician and NACOSH member.

NIOSH Director John Howard urged the committee to focus on the “investigation phase” in which youngsters are exploring career options by seeking information from guidance counselors or doing internships rather than the training phase because NISOH already funds 18 education and research centers and 25 training project grants.

The committee should also focus on the steps the larger community beyond OSHA and NIOSH, including employers, can and should take to encourage youngsters to enter the field, he said.

“What can employers do?” Mr. Howard asked. “What kind of internship programs do employers have? Do they ever go out to the high schools and talk about what’s going on in their particular organization at career day? Telling us you need to spend more money on this or that or the other thing is frankly not very helpful.”

BP P.L.C has “a very robust recruiting program” for professionals such as nurses and hygienists, said Rick Ingram, health and safety adviser at BP in Goliad, Texas. He has talked with those young professionals about why they entered the field and suggested the committee interview these professionals more broadly and ask them “how and why did you make a decision to get into this career? How did they find out? I didn’t find out about (OHS field) until I was in my late 20s. I had no idea.”

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