Leveraging the Use of Hard and Soft Skills in Process Safety

Soft skills are needed when conducting process safety activities such as Process Hazard Analysis and LOPAs, Auditing, Pre-Startup Safety Reviews, and Incident Investigations, to name a few. In each of these activities, it helps to have good interpersonal and teamworking skills, as the activities are often conducted in a group setting. Communication skills and presentation skills are also very important, since findings will need to be presented to peers or upper management.

Hard skills are also very important in process safety. This could include managing and understanding all the different types of process safety information used in a facility; as well as reviewing and interpreting a facility’s various process safety-related calculations.

These process safety-related calculations could include performing or verifying any of the following types of calculations:

• pressure relief and depressuring calculations
• facility siting studies
• fire water calculations
• safety instrumented systems verification
• water curtain calculations

All of these calculations require a high level of number-crunching, formulas, equations and data analysis; which may not come easily to a process safety practitioner with soft skills.

This paper reviews the benefits and requirement to have both soft and hard skills within process safety. It discusses how soft skills can enhance process safety. It also looks at the calculations used in process safety and is intended to appeal to those with both soft skills and hard skills. The paper summarizes the code requirements for these calculations, which recognized and generally accepted good engineering practice (RAGAGEP) exists and helps by pointing out technical details that a soft skilled process safety practitioner should be aware of when reviewing and interpreting these calculations.