Certification of safety professionals: Emerging trends of internationalisation

Professionalisation of safety began at a national level with the formation of national associations of safety staff working in industry and of government inspectors. It took its first steps towards internation-al harmonisation with attempts in the 1970s in Western Europe to arrive at agreement on the content of university level courses. The European harmonisation was boosted by the initiative of the ISSA (Inter-national Social Security Association) Safety Training Section, later taken over by ENSHPO (European Network of Safety & Health Professional Organisations), to document the regulatory schemes and the range of roles and competences of safety professionals across Europe. Transportability of professional qualifications became one of the important issues under discussion within the European Union This led to the development of two ENSHPO standards, for certification of safety managers and safety techni-cians. These have, in turn, influenced some participating countries, such as Italy, Malta and Russia to amend and upgrade their national qualifications, or to model their newly developing qualifications on these standards. A European project, EUSafe, is currently taking a further step to develop the standards into exemplary role and task descriptions, learning objectives and teaching protocols which can be used to stimulate further training initiatives and lead to further harmonisation of training requirements. Ini-tial work included a review of the education programmes that already exist in the EU and identified the states where there is a legal requirement for safety professionals. Based on the UK National Occupa-tional Standards for safety detailed profiles of occupational competence for individual professionals have been identified indicating what a health and safety professional should be able to do. These have been turned into learning outcomes for professional courses at different EQF (European Qualifications Framework) levels. This European development has now combined with a parallel development inter-nationally under INSHPO bringing together North American and Asia Pacific countries to share and learn from each other’s certification and accreditation systems.Values and TechnologyTechnology, Policy and Managemen