Take a Safety Pilgrimage in the Alamo City
San Antonio is known for its many historic missions, so Safety 2009 attendees may want to make a safety pilgrimage of sorts when they sample what this year's event has to offer. To begin, plan to attend today's Concurrent Education Session 513 from 10:45 to 11:45 a.m. Titled "A New Frontier for Safety," this session will carry attendees beyond the present world of safety compliance to safety's roots, looking at the past risk-taking culture that became the vehicle for innovation and illustrating its promise for the future new frontier.
Next stop: From 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. today, Concurrent Education Session 565, "Engineering: The Safety Holy Grail!," will review the process method that can be employed to address hazards during the design phase, thereby stopping problems before they're created.
If your journey leads you over troubled waters, crossing the generation gap, then it may be a good idea to attend Concurrent Education Session 645, "Know the Gap Before Attempting to Bridge It: How to Effectively Deliver Training to Employees of All Ages," scheduled for Tuesday, June 30, from 1 to 2 p.m. This session focuses on the age factor. Attendees will be taught how to maximize the effectiveness of training, regardless of any generation gap. Wednesday's Concurrent Education Session 780, "Talking 'Bout My Generation," from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m., will address in further detail the different learning styles and characteristics present in today's workforce generational mix, which includes the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. Case studies and recommended practices will be used to show how employees can use each generation's traits to reach that group.
The future may be a mystery, but there are guideposts for planning a safety engineering professional's career. Concurrent Education Session 653, "The Future of the Safety Engineering Profession in the United States," will take place Tuesday from 3 to 4:15 p.m. and will cover the ever-expanding role of the safety engineer. According to the session's description, the term safety engineer has become harder to define as it has grown to include health, fire protection, insurance, behavior management systems, law enforcement, environmental, legal, industrial hygiene, engineering, disease control, and more. Despite this expansion, safety engineers will be poised to move forward on national/global strategies to control hazards in and out of the workplace.