The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) offers assistance to both safety professionals and employers of safety professionals through its on-line resource the Body of Knowledge. This powerful tool helps users identify best practices to better protect people, property, and the environment.
The Body of Knowledge is a method of gaining access to the collective knowledge and experience of the safety community. Any registered user can contribute to it, and the information is checked and approved by an ASSE safety professional before it becomes available to the public. This resource contains a wide variety of information, and currently there are approximately 11,000 registered users and 6,500 inquiries per week.1 The safety, health, and environmental categories include 23 different topics, with resources divided into 6 subtopics each. In addition, there is a dictionary of terms, helpful information on becoming a safety professional and on hiring a safety professional, and career guidance.
For professionals in the field seeking resources and guidance, the Body of Knowledge includes checklists, technical papers, presentation information, training material, and program outlines in a variety of formats including web links, Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint slides, and videos.
The Body of Knowledge allows new safety professionals to enhance their knowledge and experienced professionals to benchmark their work against what others are doing. Because the responsibilities of a safety professional are broad and continually changing, the Body of Knowledge is invaluable in offering information on unfamiliar topics and on new responsibilities that may be necessitated by changes in job assignment, industry, or employer. Recent examples include the addition of Globally Harmonized System (GHS), sustainability, and wellness programs to the safety professional's duties, each of which is addressed in the Body of Knowledge. The Body of Knowledge can help safety professionals quickly "come up to speed" on these topics, stay up to date on changes in their current areas of expertise, and improve their programs by quickly disseminating new best practices as they become available.
