National health & safety manager

My Job

Name: Nobby Clark

Age: 46

Job title: National health & safety manager

Working hours: Minimum 40 hours a week but the role requires flexibility and some on-call work and can extend up to 60 or 70 hours a week.

Employer: Adecco Personnel

Pay: $40,000-$80,000 depending on experience and role requirements.


Qualifications needed: Qualifications are not essential but common courses include Massey University's Graduate Diploma in Occupational Safety & Health or a number of courses through the New Zealand Institute of Management.

Career prospects: A qualified or experienced health and safety practitioner can work in-house for any number of large New Zealand companies, as a consultant or with central or local government. Specialist areas can include environmental, biological, industrial or the ergonomic fields.



Q: What do you do?

A: My broad job brief is to ensure compliance with the Health & Safety in Employment Act 1992 for Adecco's 22 branches throughout New Zealand. Most of those requirements, however, are not in-house, they are for the 2500-3000 temporary employees that Adecco places with its client companies each week.

I manage our workplace safety management partnership with the ACC and also assist with any OSH investigations and serious harm issues right through to rehabilitation.

Most of my role, though, is preventing the need for any ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff reactions.

Q: Why did you choose the job?

A: I've had a lifetime of experience leading up to this role. I trained as a diver and marine engineer with the Royal New Zealand Navy in the 1970s and then started working as a commercial diver in offshore oil rigs.

For more than 18 years I dived initially in New Zealand, then in the North Sea, Bass Strait, Middle East, Indonesia and India.

When you are working for days on end hundreds of feet under the sea, you become almost paranoid about procedures to ensure your safety. I saw many accidents, and when something goes wrong in that environment there is little chance to rectify it. My last five years in the commercial diving world were spent developing health and safety systems.

In the early 90s I took a break from diving and helped to develop the health and safety systems for bungy jumping. Over the years I have seen enough accidents, and the consequences and downstream effects of them, to develop an extremely healthy respect for safety in the workplace.

Q: What's the best part of the job?

A: Systems can save lives and when you talk about the results of a system, not in organisational terms but in terms of fathers, sons, mothers - people - they command a tangible respect.

Often when I first talk to workers, particularly males in industrial roles, I see self-denial and invincibility. But as soon as these hard men see some of the graphic accident photos I carry around, their attitude changes instantly.

Despite health and safety being a fairly regulated environment it also feels good to install a moral and ethical standard behind the legislation, and to convince employers to take steps to look after their workers over and above what is strictly required.

Q: What are your goals?

A: Continuous improvement in health and safety for Adecco's on-hire staff. I would also like to keep bringing down the accident rate each year.

Q: What are your strengths?

A: My work experiences and real-life knowledge. A health and safety manager has to be a good communicator - I spend a lot of time making health and safety relevant to sceptical people and also networking with a variety of stakeholders, from OSH to ACC, employers to employees.

Q: What would you tell others about following your career?

A: There are a number of courses and diplomas you can do in the health and safety arena but the best practitioners combine this with workplace experience.

On-going training is also an absolute must as this is a constantly evolving profession. You also have to be proactive - it's too late once someone's hurt and the net of pain spreads far.

But for those prepared to put the time, education and energy into it, morally, health and safety management can be extremely rewarding.