Career Prospects: Occupational & Environmental Health & Safety

This is where I start writing and brainstorming individual pathways and careers.  First cab off the rank or first close-to-the-use-by-date milk marked down for a quick sale is Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety.

I'm not even sure of the relationship between these two areas.  What I want to do in this post is define the job and to investigate courses of study and qualifications, career prospects (especially overseas), and try to get right into what I might be doing day to day, hour to hour.  I also want to try to get an idea of the overview of the field, the philosophy that drives the process.  Let's begin then.  You will know it is time to turn the page when you hear Tinkerbell ring her little bell like this: [BELL RINGING].

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is about managing risk and minimizing damage to persons and property in the workplace, whatever kind of workplace it is.  Curtin's postgrad dip. in OHS requires 12 months of study, four per semester.  The curriculum comprises six core units and two optional units of study.  Some of the optional units of study sound pretty interesting.  Occupational diseases involves a bit of toxicology and epidemiology and an introduction to the history of occupational medicine.  There is a practicum option where you do a literature review of a particular area, design a program (of data collection?) and collect data and do the analysis and report the results.  There are also optional units in relevant law, risk assessment, health impact assessment, and a unit specific to mining OHS.  The core units cover accident prevention, compensation, injury management, ergonomics, safety economics, hygiene and chemical safety, and safety technologies.

The prospects for health careers in OHS are very good although I don't know if that is across the field or whether all those prospects are tied up in the resources industry.  The course at Curtin is all off-campus so I wonder whether that would allow us to live overseas while I did the course.  Perhaps Andrea could do another year of teaching in Asia and I could do some tutoring part-time while studying.  Perhaps we could move to Canada and Andrea could also get on with whatever study she wanted to do.

It is proving quite difficult to find a good web site for searching for OHS/OSH/HSE jobs across multiple countries.

That's as far as I get today.