Who Will Fill the Next Generation of Safety Roles?
Reskilling workers from operational, military and public safety roles could help address the growing shortage of OHS professionals.
- By Wyatt Bradbury
- Sep 18, 2026
But even this will only partially close the gap. There are simply not enough students studying OHS to fulfill the needs of the profession and the substantial growth that is taking place.
Closing Safety's Talent Gap Through Reskilling
So, where will a profession with double-digit growth potential in the next 10 years but not enough graduates entering the field find professionals who can learn the technical, nuanced and complex work that safety professionals do every day? The answer, thankfully, already exists in a key business concept known as reskilling - often talked about in conjunction with the concept of upskilling.
The World Economic Forum predicts that over 1 billion employees worldwide will need to reskill by 2030. Reskilling is the learning of new skills for the same kind of role in a different sector. An example is a professional from manufacturing who reskills so they can enter the data center industry. However, while that sort of reshuffling is coming, it will not solve the growth challenge our industry faces. Thus, reskilling also means positioning for a new career path, with one example being moving from an operational role into a health and safety role. It also means giving military veterans and retiring first responders who have extensive high-risk experience and plenty left to offer society the opportunity to gain new skills and join the safety profession.
Making Reskilling Strategic
Reskilling needs to be intentional - it cannot be haphazard or ad hoc.
The world economic forum has launched the Reskilling Revolution. This initiative has over 350 organizations engaged with more than 850 million employees on track to receive improved education, skills and opportunities in the next four years. It is centered on three pillars that employers also looking to reskill their employees should consider:
- Establish learning-to-earning transitions. This focuses on clear and strong pathways between education and work through employer-education collaboration. Certainly, employer support for education is a critical piece of this. Both the University of Alabama Birmingham Advanced Safety Engineering and Management Program and Columbia Southern University - as examples - offer the opportunity for employers and institutions to sign Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) that can support tuition discounts or payment, textbook support, and significant advancement in the profession. But this is only part of the equation.
The National Electrical Contractor Association (NECA) has established the NECA Safety Professionals Institute. This bootcamp of sorts provides a baseline opportunity for those entering into or looking to enter into OHS to learn, network and understand all that is entailed in the role. Quanta Services has established the PWR UP initiative, giving new OHS Graduates the opportunity to grow in the Quanta companies by spending three years rotating operating companies - receiving training, spending time in the field and linking their education to the industry.
But more opportunities are needed to help prepare those coming out of trade, operational and public sector or military roles to get up to speed on the nuances of OHS beyond what any online OSHA 30 Course can provide. And the intentionality with which NECA companies and Quanta Services are approaching “learning-to-earning,” along with organizations partnering with the University of Alabama Birmingham and Columbia Southern University, is paving the way for how to drive reskilling opportunities in our profession.
Reskilling Does More Than Fill Open Positions
There is an old fear that I was exposed to early in my career: “If we invest in developing our people, they’ll become more marketable and leave for competitors.” What I observed is that safety professionals not invested did indeed leave, and quite quickly after conversations stifling development and personal investment. In one case, the employee went to an organization that wrote expectations around development into offer letters with monetary incentives for completing them. This shows that the perception around development is not as has been traditionally perceived.
A study by Gallup and Workhuman has found that 60% of workers are learning new skills because it helps them be more effective in their current role. A further 51% see it as allowing them to learn and grow. Only 4% of participants in the research said that learning new skills was for the purpose of finding a new role.
Thus, reskilling has a secondary effect that is critically important to an organization’s bottom line: it drives retention. Gallup and Workhuman find that when employees strongly agree that they are encouraged to learn new skills, they are then 47% less likely to be searching for a new role. And if that reskilling is directly connected to role growth, then the intentionality of reskilling supercharges employee development.
Our profession is at a bit of a crossroads. It is undergoing supercharged double-digit growth with not enough entrants coming through traditional educational pipelines to fill the open roles and backfill ongoing retirements. Thus, the profession - and the organizations leading the way in OHS - need to make a concerted effort to develop and foster reskilling opportunities that will grow our ranks, so people, property, and the environment are properly protected for many years to come.