No amount of regulations or safety measures can completely eliminate risk from the world, but health and safety engineers use engineering tools and technology to make our lives as safe as possible. These engineers promote worksite and product safety to minimize danger from a variety of hazards —chemical, physical, biological, and even psychological. They focus both on preventing hazardous conditions, and developing safety measures to control problems when they do occur. There are several types of health and safety engineers: Industrial safety and health engineers often team up with public health and safety workers to investigate industrial accidents and injuries, find their cause, and prevent future problems. Fire prevention and protection engineers analyze buildings, transportation systems, and materials for potential fire hazards… and design fire prevention and suppression systems. Product safety engineers test products, from nuclear submarine reactors to children’s toys, to ensure they are safe and meet regulations. Systems safety engineers work in many fields, including aerospace, medical safety, and environmental safety, to ensure safe system designs. While health and safety engineers spend time in the office, they also travel to worksites to evaluate machinery and environments and to train workers in safety and emergency procedures. Many of these positions require a four-year college degree in environmental health and safety or a related engineering field.
What they do:
Develop and conduct tests to evaluate product safety levels and recommend measures to reduce or eliminate hazards.
On the job, you would:
Investigate causes of accidents, injuries, or illnesses related to product usage to develop solutions to minimize or prevent recurrence.
Conduct research to evaluate safety levels for products.
Report accident investigation findings.
Engineering and Technology
product and service development
design
Arts and Humanities
English language
Safety and Government
law and government
public safety and security
Business
customer service
Basic Skills
reading work related information
thinking about the pros and cons of different ways to solve a problem
Problem Solving
noticing a problem and figuring out the best way to solve it
People and Technology Systems
thinking about the pros and cons of different options and picking the best one
measuring how well a system is working and how to improve it
Verbal
communicate by speaking
communicate by writing
Ideas and Logic
notice when problems happen
make general rules or come up with answers from lots of detailed information
Visual Understanding
see hidden patterns
quickly compare groups of letters, numbers, pictures, or other things
People interested in this work like activities that include ideas, thinking, and figuring things out.
They do well at jobs that need:
Integrity
Attention to Detail
Dependability
Analytical Thinking
Adaptability/Flexibility
Cooperation
You might use software like this on the job:
Analytical or scientific software
Design Safety Engineering Designsafe
Functional hazard analysis software
Development environment software
Microsoft Visual Basic
National Instruments LabVIEW
Computer aided design CAD software
Autodesk AutoCAD
Mathsoft Mathcad
bachelor's degree or certificate after college usually needed