The Process Safety Professional. Knowledge and Skills

We are working on the book The Process Safety Professional. The current Table of Contents is available here. We are gradually releasing the contents of the book to paid subscribers. The first release is all of Chapter 1 — Knowledge and Skills.

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The goal of this book is to describe some of the skills and knowledge that a process safety professional needs in order to be effective at his or her work. Achieving this goal is a challenge because the process safety discipline is eclectic — people working in this area need to have a grasp of a wide range of technical issues and people skills. These issues and skills include, but are not limited to:

• Leading teams of people in activities such as hazards analyses and incident investigations,

• Understanding and interpreting the output from sophisticated vapor dispersion and fire and explosion models,

• Knowing and understanding the application of the latest regulations,

• Understanding engineering design principles and working with contractors and equipment vendors,

• Explaining the results of risk analyses to management,

• Knowing how industrial facilities are managed,

• Writing readable reports, often on a tight deadline, and

• Being able to sell his or her services to managers and potential clients.

No one, certainly not your author, can be an expert in all these different areas of process safety management. But it is important to have a working competence in them, and also to understand how they interact with one another.

This book is organized into twelve chapters.