Seminar: Soft Skills for Safety Practitioners

This workshop will be held on Thursday 23rd April 2026 in London.

The day will cover the soft skills that a safety practitioner needs to support safety engineering activities, and will have a variety of speakers followed by a workshop.

This event will be useful for all those who have to deal with safety on a day-to-day basis including safety engineers, consultants, auditors and managers.

Topics include:

• • How to ask the right questions
  • How to be assertive when required
  • Use of prompting techniques
  • Management of meetings where safety is discussed
  • Management of difficult behaviours regarding safety issues
  • Knowing when to stop
  • How to support an active safety culture
  • How to convince budget-holders for the need to attend events

The practical workshop will feature some typical scenarios and role-play. It should be lots of fun!

Speakers include:

Beatriz Coutinho, 3SK - How to be a Female Safety Engineer

James Ogunsakin, BAE Systems - Just being right isn’t enough: Organisational Culture and your impact (TBC)

The suggested scenarios for the workshop are:

1. Manager Denial: This is where a manager does not believe your project is safety-related, or does not believe that your safety involvement is adding any value.
2. AI Involvement: You have to argue the safe use of AI in your work.
3. Discrimination: Your safety expertise is being questioned because of who you are (race, gender, etc).
4. Release Pressure: Something must be delivered but you think the safety work is not complete or has found some issues which require resolution.
5. Team Problems: Someone is being uncooperative or disruptive which you think could impact safety (e.g. in a Hazop meeting).
6. Wider Network: Your manager does not see the need for you to be a member of a professional body related to safety, or attend a safety event (conference, seminar, etc).
7. No Independent Reports: There is nobody for you to discuss safety with if your immediate management is not receptive
8. Career: You consider that raising safety issues has impacted your career advancement negatively.

Others can be considered - please bring along your story!

This event will be held at the BCS, 25 Copthall Ave, London EC2R 7BP