Education
An engineering degree is very important to a System Safety Engineer. The SSE will need to speak the language used by design engineers to understand their concerns and communications. System Safety Managers may be required to have more education in addition to more experience.
Certification
In addition to a general engineering education, the responsibilities involved in System Safety typically demand that those responsible are Certified and/or Licensed.
The Board of Certified Safety Professionals provides testing and certification of SSEs who have the necessary background and education. The Certified Safety Professional (CSP) certification is the only nationally-recognized certification for System Safety in the United states. Individual states provide license requirements for the practice of Engineering.
The Board of Certified Safety Professionals provides testing and certification of SSEs who have the necessary background and education. The Certified Safety Professional (CSP) certification is the only nationally-recognized certification for System Safety in the United states. Individual states provide license requirements for the practice of Engineering.
Design Experience
Experience in building something that functions as intended is essential to all kinds of engineering. The hands-on, down-and-dirty, process of getting something to work as intended is an invaluable educational experience, teaching respect for the subject and confidence in the ability to complete a task.
System-Level Experience
Since System Safety is typically performed as part of a Systems Engineering process, familiarity with such a process is essential to a System Safety Engineer. This includes knowledge of: the phases of the design process, roles that other people and teams play, and the products that will be produced at each stage of the process.
Investigations
Forensic Engineering, Incident Investigation and other types of experience with failure as part of the product life-cycle are very useful to System Safety Engineers because design experience alone may never provide knowledge of how things fail and what happens when they do. By looking a the results of failures, SSE's gain intimate knowledge of failure modes and the effectiveness of various mitigating measures.
Presenting Information
All engineers are expected to be able to present information to some extent. System Safety Engineers present the results of their hazard analyses to managers and project stakeholders. This is the basic function of System Safety - to identify Hazards and potential mitigations.
Forensic Engineers also have to present their findings, both in writing and verbally - possibly in court as an expert witness. The audience for these presentations is typically much less technically proficient than an engineering audience would be and the presentation needs to include appropriate explanations of terms and methods.
Forensic Engineers also have to present their findings, both in writing and verbally - possibly in court as an expert witness. The audience for these presentations is typically much less technically proficient than an engineering audience would be and the presentation needs to include appropriate explanations of terms and methods.