Whenever you’re thinking about starting a career, you have to think about where the industry that career is in will be in the future. After all, you don’t want to plan your life around a dying industry and lose everything just a few years in.
Well, that’s the case with all careers, but the most well-known ones, such as law enforcement, legal representation, medical, and more are all pretty secure. Where do the lesser-known careers look to be going? Specifically, is a career in health and safety worth starting right now?
Well, health and safety will be necessary as long as businesses exist. So, you don’t have to worry there. However, with technological advances and innovations, the field will look pretty different.
In fact, it will probably look totally different by 2030. You won’t have to wait long to see an entirely reinvented health and safety field.
So, how is that going to happen? Let’s take a look.
1: Technological Advances
First and foremost, the tech will make a major impact on the health and safety field well before 2030.
As you’re reading this, advances are being made in a number of key points.
First, wearable tech will make worker safety a priority. There are hard hats with sensors that detect collisions and prevent them, watches that can tell professionals if employees are too tired or suffering ill effects at the workplace, and of course, on-person recording equipment that can record must-know information in real-time. All of those wearable tech pieces are available and in use, now. As time passes, not only will they become far more advanced, but new types of wearable tech will emerge that is even more useful.
Then, there’s the boost in documentation technology. Already, people from around the world can collaborate in real time, and reports can be generated with minimal time-consuming typing. In the future, generating detailed reports on production floor hazards, employee misbehavior incidents, and more will be possible with minimal downtime, and productivity can be expected to increase dramatically because of it.
Finally, the technology used to make equipment will have advanced. While this is not a direct technological advancement for the health and safety field, it will make employees’ jobs easier with more consistent results and fewer dangerous mid-production repairs needed.
2: Increased Diversity in the Workplace
Diversity in the workplace is important; especially for higher-paying positions such as health and safety.
It provides three things.
First, individuals benefit, because they get access to jobs that better support a fruitful life beyond just surviving. For now, this is a major concern for people from various racial and ethnic groups who have a harder time getting into such positions for a long list of reasons. That’s great for the individual, but it’s not the only way diversity helps.
Beyond individuals, it’s beneficial to companies. People from different backgrounds have completely different ways of approaching situations, finding resolutions, and innovating the processes they’re involved in. By lacking diversity, companies deny themselves opportunities to expand in meaningful ways. They can open doors to innovation they never thought possible, have teammates that find solutions differently, therefore faster in some situations, and overall have a more well-rounded team of professionals.
Finally, diversity in high-paying fields helps communities. Every individual who goes back to their community with a high-paying job is capable of participating in the local community in more effective ways, and this helps pull everyone in the community up. So, by opening doors for a diverse workforce, we help build stronger communities as we make higher-paid employees.
3: Policy Efficiency
The health and safety field is pretty refined. Since the subject matter is literally the health and safety of workers, a lot of thought has gone into the standards created. However, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. There is plenty of room for errors to be made, and there will always be room for improvement.
2030 is only 7 and a half years away, but that’s plenty of time for modern policies to be innovated dramatically; this can lead to better identification of risks, a lower chance for workplace accidence, faster and more effective responses to accidents, and more.
In fact, we’re just a few app updates or a new innovative release away from having the means to seamlessly relay reports on key health and safety concerns as we speak, and that’s a huge part of innovating how policies are made and enforced.
4: Workplace Standards
Hiring a more diverse workforce isn’t the end of ensuring diversity is able to provide maximum benefits. Treating employees in a diverse setting properly and retaining them is just as important. That’s how they grow and help the company move forward, as well as prevent high turnaround rates that negatively impact productivity.
With all of the information coming forward on how the health and safety field falls behind in this regard, we predict that the field will adapt to new workplace standards fairly quickly.
Some of these standards will be difficult to implement across the board for safety reasons, but a lot of adaptation at reasonable levels will happen. This can include accepting natural hairstyles in the workplace over status quo options, but it will also mean that facial hair, tattoos, certain speech patterns, and more will be less of a focus during the onboarding process.
Whatever the standard is, it will likely be adopted, but remember that safety is also important. So, there will still be hair length limitations, beard covering requirements, and professionalism standards in place regardless.
5: Understanding of Preventative Measures
As of now, a health and safety officer typically promotes safety by monitoring employee behaviour for obviously dangerous actions, inspecting machinery, and overall overseeing the work site. That leaves a lot of room for missing details, but it’s what’s possible. With time and technological advancements, the automation of monitoring such things and relaying information to related parties will likely increase the entire field’s understanding of what should be done to prevent an injury; as well as what is going on to make that less possible in the workplace.
