As Seasoned Safety Professionals are Exiting, there are Answers to Solve the Problem
By Gregory Hale
A safety professional walks into the same plant he has been working at for the past 35 years and hears a sound that seems off. It could be anything, but he homes in on one particular area where the sound is coming from and goes to work fixing the problem.
At a similar facility halfway across the country, a 35-year-old safety professional walks into the office, logs in and does a quick scan on the computer to see how the process is running and finds what appears to be an issue. He delves deeper into the system and finds where the problem is coming from.
While those are two different approaches to finding a potential safety problem in a manufacturing environment, one scenario is the result of years of experience and the other discovered through the use of technology.
With the rising exodus of experienced safety professionals getting ready to retire and leave the industry, one approach is going away, while manufacturers – and the younger generation – are embracing a stronger reliance on technology to ensure a safe manufacturing environment.
To that end, overall employment of occupational health and safety specialists and technicians will grow 12 percent from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 18,300 openings for occupational health and safety specialists and technicians end up projected each year, on average, over the decade. Many of those openings will be because workers will transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force to retire. But the catch is, can companies fill the roles?
Experience is Vital
“A lot of the old guard have experience and competency that companies don’t use to prepare the next generation,” said Matt Henderson, NAM business development leader – Triconex Process Safety/Turbomachinery at Schneider Electric. “I have faith in the next generation as far as them being technically competent, but they don’t have experience. There’s no replacement for experience. They are much faster to look at the next offer in technology, like artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas the older generation might be smarter about experience, but they don’t use the tools as well. There’s something to be said for that, but there’s also a potential in the industry that AI can replace some people’s work.”
Learning from data, though, can help ease the transition for the next generation.
“In the next five years, you will lose many of the people with a long history of process safety who were strong advocates for safety best practices,” said Sheri Sammons, global functional safety director industrial automation at Schneider Electric. “I think the only way to move into the future with process safety is to make it something where data is only accessible by certain people who can figure out where it is. It’s going to have to combine into a place where the people that run the plant, the process engineers, the managers, the plant managers, the site managers, where they understand what they’re running and what their risk is. They’re going to have to have tools that help them run that risk. Everything is going to have to be easier for people to understand and use technology to get there.”
As more sites boost their levels of digitalization, that means connectivity will increase which opens a facility up for more issues like power outages or cyberattacks.
Digitalization Ramifications
“We’re going with more networking, we’re opening our architectures, we going to a more decentralized management, so a compromise will have a bad impact on facilities, which can lead to catastrophic incidents,” said Ahmed Elbatanony, functional safety offers manager at Schneider Electric. “As you adapt more digital and functional safety, you have to adapt cybersecurity. You need to work with your team and add experts and hiring resources and follow the standards and apply more best practices on how to manage safety, manage access, and manage the level of security.
“End users must really train, manage, plan, and adapt standards and have these actions in place for functional safety, and also cybersecurity,” Elbatanony said. “They need this not just for functional safety, but for all their DCSes, for PLCs, and for automation control within the operational technology environment.”
With more safety professionals retiring and with fewer workers available, technology has gotten to the point where visibility and evaluating risk can occur onsite or offsite.
“I actually think we’re getting to the point where a process safety professional could be able to monitor what’s going on and understand the risk with the technology that’s available,” Sammons said. “You don’t have to be at a site. I mean, it’s good to go visit a site to see what their overall culture is because you’re not going to see that outside of the site. But from what’s available to see the near misses, you can look at how the plant is operating, you can see how many incidents they have, what the investigations are, and if they are doing the testing. You can get all of that information pretty much using technology today outside of the site as long as it’s in a cyber secure format.”
Uniting Old with the New
Old guard safety professionals have always been stuck in their ways for very good reasons. Until technology and the next generation of workers come in and successfully take over, the experienced professionals are looking to meld the old with the new.
“The industry needs these folks to still be there for sure until they really fully transfer everything to the new ones,” Elbatanony said. “We need them because you need to have that level of understanding and awareness of what you’re doing. It’s not just like if you’re programming a controller or a PLC, the concept is when you’re doing it for functional safety PLC systems, your awareness and your focus is different. You need to have that level of awareness and understanding and knowledge of the impact. You need to understand you’re programming it for protection layers. If you’re changing this, it might contradict with the safety requirements. You need to be fully aware. You need to be cautious of what you’re doing and not just implementing things or shortcutting anything.”
But change is coming.
“I see more younger people much more open to doing things in a more technical way, especially if they can work remote or they want to do things in a way that doesn’t have them being a plant person walking a unit to go do something,” Henderson said. “Technology and artificial intelligence are going to close some gaps, maybe even make things better than they ever were.”
People and Technology
It is very easy to dwell on the fact that quality, experienced safety professionals are leaving the industry, and they are taking a vast library of institutional knowledge with them. But as they say in sports and in business, if you lose one person, you have to go with the next person up.
When it comes to safety, there will always be a person, but that person will be working with a team of technology applications. That technology may not hear a problem on the plant floor like that grizzled veteran, but searching, finding and understanding the data to locate where and what the problem is can help solve safety issues.
That can be a solution to the safety brain drain.