If you've been in IH or a related profession for some time, chances are you feel pretty good about how your career has progressed. After all, you possess a solid foundation of training and experience, you've kept up with the latest developments on the technology and regulatory fronts and your organization's health and safety programs consistently meet their objectives. Barry O'Donnell, associate director of the MBA program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., says this dilemma is nothing new to people in scientific and technical positions. Before IHs can put their role in a business perspective, however, they must first understand enough about business itself.
Top managers can now thoroughly analyze their operations and benchmark themselves with competitors.
This capability, in turn, gives management more control over expenditures, and they want to be sure the return justifies the expense. Health and safety programs are not immune from this scrutiny. Unfortunately, too few IHs feel comfortable conversing in a dialect of dollars and cents. We have to go further and find links between what we do and other components of the business. As such, an IH's training requirements will depend largely on his or her background, current responsibilities and career goals.