Resources
Assessing an occupational risk
Assessing a risk means distinguishing hazard from exposure, rating the resulting criticality, then choosing the prevention measure in an established order. The method holds in five moves, and it applies to any workstation.
Hazard, exposure, criticality
A hazard is a property: a rotating part, a corrosive product, a suspended load. Risk arises from a person's exposure to that hazard, and it is rated by the severity of what may occur crossed with the frequency of exposure. That rating orders the actions and makes the trade-off defensible to management: you deal first with what is severe and frequent. The risk register records that analysis workstation by workstation, with date and author.
- The hazard named by its physical, chemical or organisational nature
- Exposure described by the real task and its frequency
- A rating crossing severity and frequency, applied uniformly
- A ranking that orders actions by decreasing criticality
- A dated, signed risk register, updated whenever a workstation changes
The hierarchy of prevention measures
- 01
Remove the hazard
Changing the process or the product settles the risk at its root. The most durable measure, and the first to examine.
- 02
Protect collectively
Guarding, extraction, railings: collective protection covers everyone permanently, with no individual action.
- 03
Organise the work
Lockout, permits, prevention plans, rotation: organisation reduces exposure itself.
- 04
Equip individually
Personal protective equipment completes the previous measures and is chosen according to the rated risk.
- 05
Train and verify
Training anchors the gestures, field checks confirm they are applied. Both are recorded in the register.
The titles that prepare for this analysis
Three professional titles, three levels of responsibility on the same skill. The hour counts published in the catalogue place each one's commitment.
| Professional title | Level | Duration | Credits | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health, Safety and Environment Officer | Level 4 | 9 months | 60 | 600 h |
| HSE Supervisor | Level 5 | 9 months | 70 | 700 h |
| Food Quality and Hygiene Technician | Level 5 | 10 months | 70 | 700 h |
What the catalogue devotes to risk assessment
- taught hours on assessment
- 240
- hours on prevention
- 200
- modules in the industry and HSE field
- 140
The largest block of the HSE programme.
Protection, lockout, permits, co-activity.
The largest field of the continuing-education base.
Explore next
- Incident investigationFact gathering, causal tree, root causes, action plan and lessons learned: conducting an investigation after an incident or a near miss.
- Cybersecurity reflexesIdentities and permissions, updates, tested backups, network segmentation and awareness: the measures that protect most for the least effort.
- Responding to an incidentDetection, containment, eradication, restoration, evidence collection and the post-incident report: the response procedure and what it requires you to prepare.
- Service continuityAcceptable downtime, acceptable data loss, backups, switchover, power and drills: building a verifiable continuity plan.
- Networks and cloudAddressing, routing, segmentation, virtualisation, containers and cloud architectures: the fundamentals of a controlled infrastructure.
- Industrial maintenancePreventive plan, vibration analysis, thermography, alert thresholds, spare parts and availability indicators: organising a site's maintenance.