Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a safety engineer and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Safety Engineer is responsible for ensuring people are free from danger, risk or injury in the workplace by developing safety programs to minimize losses due to injuries and property damage. This role eliminates unsafe conditions and practices in industrial plants, mines, hospitals, stores as well as construction sites.
The duties of a safety manager as they are commonly known vary from company to company, but the foundational ones include developing broad safety programs, studying the equipment, procedures, and records of accidents in the company, pointing out hazards and finding our security solutions, suggesting ways fix unsafe structures, recommending changes in the layout of the plant, drawing up plans for the regular maintenance of machinery, teaching safety work habits to the management and the staff.
Core Skills Required to be a Safety Engineer
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A safety engineer should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Organized Workplace:
Organized Workplace is a vital characteristic that helps the business to thrive for long term due to the sense of structure and order which efficiently promotes the team spirit.
A Safety Engineer must be organized in the general organizing, planning, communication, time management, scheduling, coordinating resources and meeting deadlines to support the staff in being well structured and run the company successfully.
Safety at work:
Safety is being protected from hurt or other non-desirable outcomes that may tend to overrule a situation and cause damages of different kinds.
A Safety Engineer must learn to keep the organization safe from different risks by developing a high sense of alertness that detects danger from afar and stops it before it causes risk, danger or injury in the organization.
Inspiring others:
Inspiring is encouraging one to be their best in contributing to the vision of an organization where they are placed and entrusted to work.
A Safety Engineer must create a culture where the staff can use their professional prowess and aspire to be the best by giving them a clear vision and purpose through decisive leadership that motivates and inspires them.
Equal Opportunity and Diversity:
Equal Opportunity and Diversity means having employees from a wide range of background that includes different ages, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious belief, educational background, physical ability and treating them equally.
A Safety Engineer is required by the law to create a workplace free from discrimination and harassment to its employees as well as understand and adhere to the rights and responsibilities under the human rights and antidiscrimination law.
Flexibility:
Flexibility is an important skill that allows employers and employees to make an arrangement about working on maintaining a work/life balance to help organizations improve the productivity and efficiency of their balance.
A Safety Engineer needs creative ideas on how to plan flexible schedules for all his employees by incorporating flexible working arrangements and individual flexibility agreements that allow negotiation to change how certain agreements apply to them and how they can be adjusted.
Role Awareness:
Role Awareness is the ability to be informed of your role in a given environment as well as understand the expectations placed on a position and to see how they are met apparently.
A Safety Engineer must assess, measure and quantify his employee's awareness of their roles to see if they are transparent about what is required of each of them and review what kind of results they are delivering from their understanding.
Seeing Potential Problems:
Seeing Potential Problems is the ability to structure the current situations and identify developments that could cause problems in the future.
A Safety Engineer needs to see potential problems before they occur and work to stop them early enough, he also has to stay ahead of the flow not to be caught you by upcoming issues that could be easily prevented if they were noted soon enough.
Business Trend Awareness:
Business Trend Awareness is the capacity to be conscious of the changing ways in which the companies are developing in the marketplace.
A Safety Engineer should have the required knowledge of new business trends that he can instigate or follow and the understanding of how they are impacting the business decisions which will eventually bring success to the employees as well as the enterprise
Research:
Research is the ability to stay updated on the latest trends in different fields as per your concern or the concern of your company or business.
A Safety Engineer ought to stay up to date on the latest trends in hiring, leading, retention, technology and much more by using the newest research methods that allow him to make better decisions and improve productivity.
Mechanical Skills:
Mechanical Skills are the abilities to solve problems that arise in the workplace, although it may vary from one company to another.
A Safety Engineer must be well equipped with technical skills to handle any underlying mechanical problem that may arise from wrong scheduling to meeting unique customer needs, budget, legal constraints, environmental and social issues, technology changes and any other management requirements.
Hard Skills Required to be a Safety Engineer
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A safety engineer should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.