Assessing core competencies and their training demands for industrial safety and hygiene professional engineers in Taiwan

This study was set out to investigate the contents of core competences and their training demands for industrial safety and hygiene professional engineers (ISHPEs). The contents of 7 core and 35 sub-core competences were developed and used to conduct field surveys to safety and health managers (SHMs) from two types of industry of the high-tech and traditional, respectively. Both the “deficiency” of ISHPEs and the “importance” of each investigated sub-core competence were assessed by the SHMs from each selected industry type using a 5-point Likert scale (5: very high; 4: high; 3: moderate; 2: low; 1: very low). We found that 9 out of 35, and 13 out of 35 sub-core competences were “high deficiency” and “high importance”, respectively. The Bayesian decision making process was used to determine the training demand of each investigated sub-core competence. We found that 16 and 14 sub-core competences were determined as “high training demand” for ISHPEs based on judgments made by SHMs of the high-tech and traditional industry, respectively. Among them, 13 were consistently identified by SHMs of the both types should be considered the first priority subjects for conducting on-the-job trainings for ISHPEs.