As the field of Safety and Health enters the 21st Century, the professionalism of the SH&E practitioners continues to dramatically increase with each passing year. The new wave of SH&E professionals will demand the use of more meaningful metrics and rational for where organizational resources will be spent in the name of SH&E. Even the term "SH&E could disappear. In addition to changing the methods used to manage safety and health programs, these new approaches will change what we look at when managing the safety, health and environmental issues to which an organization is exposed. The outcome will be a shift from managing regulations and hazards to the implementation of managing the risk to which organizations are exposed. This shift in thinking will permeate the lexicon of the SH&E profession in that terms such as "zero accidents" and "safety first" will be replaced with the concept of "Acceptable Risk". Sacred cows and "drivers" such as obsession with regulatory compliance will being replaced with assessing an organizations risk exposures. While not ignoring compliance with regulations, regulatory compliance be viewed more as a basic minimum or "given" in an organization's approach to SHE, but not the driving force. This shift will even impact how standards will be written.
For the better part of the 20th Century most safety professionals came from a discipline that was unrelated to safety. The use of the term "professional" could even be questioned since many were not college educated, possessed little to no training in the field of safety and were not viewed as key players in the management team. It can even be argued that in many instances the safety department was used as a "dumping ground" to place failed managers from other parts of the organization. While you might have to have an accounting degree to be the Chief Financial Officer, or a sales and marketing degree to be the Director of Marketing, or a business degree to be the VP of Manufacturing, anyone was qualified for safety. This is rapidly changing. Many universities now offer degreed programs in safety, industrial hygiene and environmental sciences.
Graduate programs in these fields now exist. Some business schools have come to recognize that safety is moving from a "nice to have" benefit to a critical component of an organizations business plan. But perhaps the largest strides have been made in the graduates who are entering the business world and government with safety degrees. There is an growing understanding that to impact the organization you must behave like other disciplines in the organization. Whereas budgets, insurance costs, capital expenditures were secondary considerations for "old time" safety managers, now they are a vital part of their job duties. The new SH&E professional more closely resembles a Risk Manager then the old Education, Enforcement and Engineering Safety Manager model.
