Book: The Process Safety Professional. Chapter 1/1. The Process Safety Discipline

Definition of Process Safety Management

Credit: Ian Sutton

Many of our recent posts have been taken from the manuscript of the book The Process Safety Professional. The goal of the book is to describe some of the skills, knowledge and experience that are needed for a process safety professional to be effective in his or her work.

This book is not intended to be a process safety primer. There are many other books, such as our own Process Risk and Reliability Management, and the many publications from the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), that fill that role.

The book is progressing well. Many of the posts at this site have already featured some of the book’s content. We are now releasing the contents of the chapters as they are finished to our paid subscribers. This post is the first in the series. It provides the first part of Chapter 1 — The Process Safety Professional.

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A challenge that all process safety professionals face, and that I as author of this book also faced, is to do with the eclectic nature of the discipline. Those working in this discipline need to have a grasp of a wide range of technical issues and also to have a grasp of the ‘soft skills’ (which are not soft at all) to do with understanding and communicating with a wide range of people. The following is a list of just a few of the skills and attributes that someone working in this discipline needs to have.