Safety’s Missing Middle: Why Technical Expertise Still Matters

As safety strategies evolve, employers risk losing the technical practitioners who connect compliance, advanced concepts and real-world risk.

• By Stasia DeMarco
• Aug 26, 2026

The safety profession is advancing rapidly. Concepts such as human and organizational performance, serious injury and fatality prevention and psychological safety are increasingly shaping how organizations think about risk.

But as safety professionals embrace those approaches, Wyatt Bradbury, principal for health and safety at Avetta, sees a potential problem: The profession may be losing the experienced technical practitioners who connect high-level safety strategy with the realities of work in the field.

“We had lost our critical middle, the engine of professionals that really make safety and health go,” Bradbury said.

The Gap Between Compliance and Strategy

Bradbury describes a profession with considerable expertise at both ends of the spectrum. Some safety professionals are strong leaders and managers working with sophisticated concepts, including human and organizational performance, psychosocial risk and serious injury and fatality prevention. Others have developed strong knowledge of OSHA regulations and compliance requirements.

The gap, he said, lies between them.

Organizations need practitioners capable of conducting strong risk assessments, understanding complex work and collaborating across functions to solve problems. They must be able to take regulatory requirements and advanced safety concepts and apply both to conditions workers actually encounter.

That need is particularly important as industries such as data center construction expand and employers need to scale their safety operations quickly.

Technical competency also goes beyond knowing what a regulation requires. Bradbury pointed to fall protection as one example. A safety professional may understand basic requirements but still need deeper expertise to determine how fall protection should be used in complex environments, including areas not designed for worker access.

Electrical safety presents similar challenges. Professionals may need to understand not only electrical safe work requirements and NFPA 70E but also how to develop complex lockout/tagout procedures, conduct assessments and perform required audits and inspections.

Similar challenges arise in scaffolding, trenching and excavation, confined spaces and other high-risk work.

“It’s easy to know what the requirements are, but it’s that application of the requirements in the more unique instances,” Bradbury said.

Fundamentals Before Buzzwords

Bradbury isn't arguing that the safety profession should retreat from newer approaches. Instead, he believes advanced concepts become more useful when practitioners first develop the technical foundation needed to apply them.

Without experience applying regulations and managing situations in which regulations do not provide a simple answer, professionals may lack the context needed to fully understand newer approaches.

“We’ve got so many people that all want to be in the manager seat and all want to be setting strategy and all want to be calling the shots that we’re losing these very advanced technical practitioners that have experience and know how to really implement safety and health practice well,” Bradbury said.

When Safety Professionals Are Stretched Too Thin

The problem can be particularly difficult for small and mid-sized organizations. Bradbury said Avetta's Safety Maturity Index work has shown these organizations can struggle when they have only one or two safety professionals — or when safety is bundled with fleet, human resources and other administrative responsibilities.

Those professionals can become reactive, addressing whichever problem is most urgent rather than proactively managing risk.

“Whatever fire is burning the brightest is the one they’ve got to go address,” Bradbury said.

Resource constraints can affect training as well. Workers may receive OSHA 10- or 30-hour training covering regulatory requirements without necessarily getting the practical knowledge needed to navigate complex work situations.

“We tend to oversimplify the complexity of work,” Bradbury said.

Rebuilding the Missing Middle

Rebuilding that technical layer may require employers to rethink how safety professionals are developed.

Bradbury sees potential in apprenticeship, mentorship and intentional reskilling, particularly for experienced workers moving from the trades into safety positions.

Those workers already understand how work is performed and may recognize many of its hazards. With appropriate development, they can add the technical safety knowledge and administrative skills needed to conduct assessments, write job hazard analyses and procedures and manage safety programs.

Simply assigning someone the title of safety professional isn't enough.

“It needs to be an investment,” Bradbury said. Training should go beyond teaching regulations to develop the ability to apply sound safety and health practices in real-world conditions.

Employers also shouldn't assume every highly skilled worker is automatically suited for a safety role. Bradbury compared the issue with promoting the best craft worker into a foreperson or supervisory position. Technical ability alone does not necessarily mean someone has the interpersonal, leadership or administrative skills required for the new job.

Instead, organizations can identify workers who have the right aptitude and intentionally develop their safety competencies.

“I don’t think it’s just a straight promotion,” Bradbury said. “I think it’s finding those individuals who have the aptitude for it.”

Building Innovation on a Stronger Foundation

Bradbury sees concepts such as serious injury and fatality prevention and human factors as important parts of the profession's future. His concern is what happens when professionals learn terminology without developing the practical expertise required to turn those ideas into risk reduction.

“The advanced concepts are important,” Bradbury said. “I don’t want to downplay or discount concepts like SIF or human factors. I do believe that they truly are the way forward.”

But without a strong technical foundation, organizations risk developing safety leaders who can discuss innovations in the boardroom but struggle to translate those concepts into protections workers can depend on every day.

“When we skip that foundation or we progress too quickly through that foundation, we end up with a large group of safety leaders that speak language, they speak innovation, they’ve got the boardroom buzzwords, but they don’t actually understand how to apply those concepts in practice,” Bradbury said.