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 always enough – Navigating an Organisation's Culture

The suggested scenarios for the workshop are:

1. AI Involvement: (a) You have to argue the safe use of AI in your work or (b) You are under pressure to incorporate AI without justification.
2. Management Pressure: (a) A manager does not believe your project is safety-related, or does not believe that your safety involvement is adding any value, or (b) Something must be delivered but you think the safety work is not complete or has found some issues which require resolution.
3. Marginalisation: (a) You consider that raising safety issues has impacted your career advancement negatively, (b) 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), or (c) Your safety expertise is being questioned because of who you are (race, gender, etc).
4. Team Problems: Someone is being uncooperative or disruptive which you think could impact safety (e.g. in a Hazop meeting).

Others can be considered - please bring along your story!

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

The provisional schedule for the day is below: