Three tips for safety engineers

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1.jpg The position of safety engineer in China is rather awkward – recent graduates in safety engineering have no skills or experience, and what’s more, they often have to take on the responsibility of managing a company’s safety efforts on their own, with no one to guide them. Yet the title given to such individuals is “safety engineer”; it seems that only those who like to exaggerate things would come up with such a title. Given the current situation, it is difficult to ensure that a recently graduated college student can definitely find an enterprise with a supervisor who can guide them in gaining experience. (Actually, this is basically a fantasy in China.) No one will take you on, and you can’t stay a safety engineer in the eyes of others for the rest of your life – what should you do? Here are three suggestions for you to consider: 1. You need to know what you’re doing every day. You might think this is an easy question to answer, but that’s not the case. The boss doesn’t know what you’re busy with, and your colleagues don’t know either; it can be said that such busyness only makes time pass by, but it’s meaningless for work. But one exception exists: you are not busy with work-related tasks for the company, but rather are secretly investing time in improving yourself, and this investment includes learning, as well as social activities and so on. 2. You need to be aware of the value of your profession. Simply put, in the field of safety management, the value of your role lies in ensuring that no work-related injuries occur in the company. But sometimes, whether an industrial accident will occur or not is not something that a safety engineer can decide. For example, during the peak production period of a company, since the focus is on fulfilling orders, workers work overtime and machines run continuously, increasing the time that operators spend in dangerous environments as well as the machine failure rate; this raises the likelihood of industrial accidents. On the other hand, during the off-peak production period, there are few workers in the workshop, and thus the number of industrial accidents also decreases. These may seem, in terms of the figures, to be simple counts of work-related accidents, but the peak and off-peak periods for a company cannot be determined by a single safety engineer. At this point, if you focus solely on the number of work-related injuries, you will feel even more stressed, especially since the company is also keeping a close eye on it. More often than not, a sense of professional responsibility will force you to keep dealing with various problems; note the word I’m using here: “dealing with”. In fact, you can recall that when you encounter some issues at work, the feeling isn’t definitely one of tenderness. Day after day, as these issues persist, many people lose interest in a particular career and start to wonder, \"This isn’t what I want.\" (as per a lyric), but there’s nothing you can do about it. Whether it’s you who choose a career or the career that chooses you, it’s inevitable that the youth you invest in your career will never be returned to you. Therefore, before starting out or while working in a career, there is one issue that you cannot and should not ignore—your professional value. In other words, even if one day your profession is looked down upon and mocked, you should understand that those who mock you simply don’t understand; it’s not because you made the wrong choice regarding your career. 3. Don’t give up on learning*. Graduation means freedom–and then nothing more. I’ve heard from many people who graduated over 10 years ago that they haven’t read a book since then, not even magazines; it seems they hated books so much during their reading days that one day they finally got rid of that hatred and were completely free from it. The widespread use of intelligent electronic devices has made more knowledge available to readers. As a result, many people who do not read books can still talk knowledgeably, embodying the image of the all-round scholars of the 21st century, which underscores the power of knowledge. Let those who don’t like reading feel the immense pressure associated with the demands of the times. In fact, this pressure is justified, and it will only increase rather than decrease. The rapid flow of information means that anyone who hasn’t studied seriously for 3 to 5 years after graduation falls far behind when it comes to new knowledge. As mentioned earlier regarding safety management, **since everyone is still in the process of exploring, giving up on learning is undoubtedly a choice to stay outdated, to be content with a pile of outdated information and feel pleased with oneself. Just as the \"5S\" system was introduced in this country, some people have invented \"6S\" and others have invented \"11S\". As for the suggestions from safety engineers, I will give just three; in fact, one useful suggestion is enough – who can remember too many? To sum it up: the prospects of a profession do not lie in the profession itself, but in the people who work in it. Just as there are outstanding individuals in every field, what matters most is knowing how to strive and being determined to work hard – this is something we should all consider constantly. Those who engage in disruptive behavior, acting as if they possess some sort of \"justice,\" certainly should not be experiencing such things as someone who is new to this profession.