Looking for a new position in the health and safety field? You’re not alone—and that’s not something you should necessarily find comforting. It’s nice to know that your situation isn’t unique. But it also means that there’s going to be plenty of competition for any safety job opening. 

You need to make your resume stand out from the stack of job applications sitting on the hiring manager’s desk. Fortunately, there’s a free online safety job guide that outlines the knowledge, skills and experience you should highlight to help you get the safety job you want. 

And if you don’t have all the required attributes then the guide gives you advice on how you can start developing them. After all, successful EHS careers don’t happen on their own. They require focus, determination and constant improvement.

No matter what stage of career you’re at, the guide will show you the steps you need to get better in your current role—or to get the safety job you want. It starts by outlining the basic and advanced safety knowledge that power a safety career. 

A lot of the stuff on the list is obvious, but a few of the items might surprise you. In particular, there’s a detailed breakdown of the financial knowledge that you should develop if you haven’t already. (And if you think that safety professionals don’t need to speak the language of finance, the guide does a great job of making the case for learning to talk dollars and cents in a safety context.)

It also points out that one of the few safety issues that applies to every single industry is human factors. And the EHS careers guide even gives you a quick tour of a few basic concepts of how human error and people’s personal mindsets affect workplace safety.

But being an effective safety leader requires a lot more than just knowledge, and the guide outlines several soft skills that are also necessary. From the ability to effectively manage organizational change to how to be a strong safety communicator, you’ll learn what skills you should master in order to take the next step in your safety career.

Finally, you’ll discover a number of tips and tricks to help you get ahead in the EHS field, including how to:

• make the most of networking opportunities
• build consensus within your organization
• make yourself—and your safety initiatives—more visible.

The downloadable PDF (which you can get here) also comes with a quick self-assessment to help you evaluate what stage you’re at in your personal skills development. It’s an easy way to determine where to focus your efforts in establishing more robust and reliable safety skills.

It’s worth noting that the guide is useful for all sorts of careers beyond the safety department. It will give plant managers and other senior leaders a good idea of what to expect from safety professionals, and it can also provide a great deal of context for frontline supervisors who need to have safety conversations as part of their job.

All told, the guide on safety job improvements is worth reading, especially given that it doesn’t cost a thing. You can download it now and read it in under 20 minutes. What you do from there depends entirely on the skills you want to work on and how driven you are to succeed in pursuing a better career in health and safety.