Safety engineer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Scope of a Safety Engineer
2 Functions of a Safety Engineer
3 Personality and role
4 Teamwork
5 See also
6 External links and sources

[edit] Scope of a Safety Engineer

To perform their professional functions, safety engineering professionals must have education, training and experience in a common body of knowledge. They need to have a fundamental knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, statistics, mathematics, computer science, engineering mechanics, industrial processes, business, communication and psychology. Professional safety studies include industrial hygiene and toxicology, design of engineering hazard controls, fire protection, ergonomics, system and process safety, safety and health program management, accident investigation and analysis, product safety, construction safety, education and training methods, measurement of safety performance, human behavior, environmental safety and health, and safety, health and environmental laws, regulations and standards. Many safety engineers have backgrounds or advanced study in other disciplines, such as management and business administration, engineering, education, physical and social sciences and other fields. Others have advanced study in safety. This extends their expertise beyond the basics of the safety engineering profession.

[edit] Functions of a Safety Engineer

The major areas relating to the protection of people, property and the environment are:

Anticipate, identify and evaluate hazardous conditions and practices.

Develop hazard control designs, methods, procedures and programs.

Implement, administer and advise others on hazard control programs.

Measure, audit and evaluate the effectiveness of hazard control programs.

[edit] Personality and role

Oddly enough, personality issues can be paramount in a safety engineer. They must be personally pleasant, intelligent, and ruthless with themselves and their organization. In particular, they have to be able to "sell" the failures that they discover, as well as the attendant expense and time needed to correct them. They can be the messengers of bad news.

Safety engineers have to be ruthless about getting facts from other engineers. It is common for a safety engineer to consider software, chemical, electronic, electrical, mechanical, procedural, and training problems in the same day. Often the facts can be very uncomfortable.

[edit] Teamwork

It is important to make the safety engineers part of a team, so that safety problems cannot be discounted as due to the safety engineers' personality problems or ignored by firing a single engineer.

It is a severe safety problem if an engineering team or management discredits a safety engineer: either the manager appointed a poor engineer to the position, indicating that there may be numerous undiscovered safety issues, or the team has inverted development priorities and considers safety to be less important than upper management or government does.