An accidental health and safety career

Posted on August 7, 2024

I came into the health and safety profession almost by accident. When I was a construction site manager, across the country, I understood health and safety requirements and legislation and what should be done on site. I used this knowledge as a method of controlling contractors on site to ensure that they just didn’t turn up and work but rather tell me what they were going to be doing and the need to carry out the legally required risk assessment.

Often this resulted in my helping them with that task as well as preparing method statements, work programmes and training records, which meant that I was often ‘poacher and gamekeeper’ at the same time. That in turn led to contractors asking me if they could pay me to use my ‘pieces of paper’ for their future jobs.

I refused this, of course, because of the potential for conflicts of interest, but I realised I could make a living out of it at exactly the time I was looking to spend less time working away and being able to go home at the end of my day.

I contacted the companies that I had worked for and asked if they needed help with organising their health and safety protocols, procedures and arrangements of managing their sites and some of them agreed. They saw that a safe site is a productive and profitable site.

No evangelical quest

So, for me, my career wasn’t a case of seeing the light, it was more about enjoying the beauty of good site management. When I started many contractors were looking to be accepted onto approved lists with quality clients and they valued my honesty and integrity and those extra pieces of advice – the information, the education, the training and the resources to look after themselves and lead a good quality of life away from the rigours of working in construction.

Now after 25 years of running Courtley Health and Safety, I have the benefit of the long view. This is a great profession. It’s people led and it’s fulfilling and rewarding. It’s not about ego, because in my mind that gets in the way of the task in hand and can make you a poorer operator. The thing about health and safety is that you will never really know how good you are. It’s weird because you have to be comfortable with non-conformance and if you are picking up on that, the likelihood of something going wrong is reduced.

This is not about stopping accidents; it’s about identifying when things could go wrong and fixing them in a timely manner to reduce the chance of serious accidents. The magic is that you are not doing something that is going to produce an outcome, but doing something that is not going to produce an outcome!

Fantastic career

The theory behind health and safety is that you are doing things to make people’s lives better and they don’t even know that you are doing that. It’s not a career for someone who just wants to collect ‘badges’. It’s not a million miles away from being a football referee whose job it is apply the rules and make it flow and be enjoyable; good health and safety is something you don’t notice – and that goes for the person as well. If you’ve got it right it should just happen and if it isn’t right then they will come looking for you to help.

That said, it’s important to talk to people, from the person at the gate to the person in charge of the site, because they are all cogs in the wheel and then sift out what can be changed and improved.

Courtley Health and Safety has a great variety of clients so the work is different and stimulating, that is not always the case in other places, of course.

Staying ahead

Health and safety is different from when I started and I don’t mean just in terms of rules and regulations. It used to be very much ex-military men telling people what they have to do, whereas now, there’s a better gender balance and the profession now concerns itself more with behavioural safety with a holistic approach to the job and the workers as people. Today it’s important to stay head of the game and anticipate the way the world is changing societally and technologically and still achieve the goal of not damaging people.

Qualifications and pay

New starters can expect to start at around £25k and within a year can reach £30k; a manager or advisor is usually on around £40-£45k and a director of health and safety for a large organisation can look to earn around £75-80k per annum.

It doesn’t matter to me who comes looking for a job and what experience they have. For me the main qualities for a health and safety role are personality and attitude, strength of character and discipline – so someone who can take responsibility for other people having assessed the right course of action. The formal qualifications then can follow all the way through to chartered status, if they have the attitude and personality to do that.