Jill:

From Vivid Learning Systems, this is the Accidental Safety Pro.

My name is Jill James, Chief Safety Officer with Vivid. And you might be wondering, "Well, what is an accidental safety professional anyway? What does that mean?" I know that none of us seem to have come about it the same way. You know, we didn't graduate from high school and when people would ask us, "What are you going to do with your life?" that we'd say, "Hey, I want to be a safety professional or a health professional for workplaces."

Most of us came by it through an accidental means.

I know that's certainly how it was for me, and so every time I'm talking or meeting with someone new in our career path, I'm asking them the question, "Well, how did you get into this?"

And everyone always has a unique and different story.

It's not like we set out on a career path and decided to go to college and be a safety and health professional. And so I love those stories, and I love collecting them, and that's what we're going to talk about in this podcast, of how did people become safety and health professionals accidentally, and hear their stories.

So many of us are solo operators where we do our job, and we don't often have time to talk with other safety and health professionals to learn from them, or mentorship-wise, and you know, a lot of us go to conferences maybe once or twice a year, where we get a chance to talk with other people in our field of practice, but we're busy at the conferences, taking in new information, and we don't have a lot of opportunities to really hear someone else's story, or hear what makes them tick, or how they go about performing the work that we do every day. And it's nice to learn from other people and see what you can adopt into your own practice, so that in our own time and in our own way, we can hear from one another and share our stories.

And so, that's where this came from.

Thank you for being with me, and I hope you'll join us again and again, where I'll be talking with other health and safety professionals across the country, to hear how they became safety and health pros accidentally.