Wanderings on a Process Safety Journey

The road to becoming a Process Safety Professional is often different for each traveler. Each road is marked by different roles and experiences. This paper reviews just one such journey and is intended to demonstrate that the road can include diverse experiences and unexpected twists and turns. Future Process Safety Professionals may not even have process safety on their radar screen as they initially plan and chart their career path. The engagement in Process Safety topics typically begins with a limited involvement and expands over time to include many more aspects of process safety than the traveler imagined.

The storyline here will look at a career in three general buckets – early career, mid-career, and later career. The experiences gained in each phase will be mapped to the applicable elements of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) Risk Based Process Safety Management System to show how personal engagement might change throughout the career phases. This mapping will be retrospective as the CCPS Risk Based Process Safety Management System did not arrive upon the scene until 2007.[1]