Who will replace the experts? Tackling the UK's OSH skills crisis

From mentoring and skills passports to succession planning and AI governance, RoSPA's OSH Skills Commission has set out an ambitious blueprint for tackling the erosion of workplace safety competence. Louis Wustemann examines the key recommendations and the challenges ahead.

How do we tackle the problems of OSH skills attrition and the fading of safety and health competence within UK organisations, as one generation retires and the next is not given sufficient on-the-job education and development to replace that expertise adequately?

That was the major question tackled by RoSPA’s OSH Skills Commission, the fruits of whose work have been published in a new report. The Commission’s wide-ranging recommendations include the introduction of a skills passport, ring-fenced resources for mentoring and development and closer attention to the introduction of new technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Chaired by RoSPA Vice President Baroness Crawley of Edgbaston, the Commission, launched in February 2026, consisted of five expert round tables, made up of the OSH, occupational health and human resources professions and representatives of trade unions. The groups worked on themes including worker recruitment, retention, wellbeing and the impact of technology on skills. They were led by specialists including IOSH President Richard Bate and Kate Field, Global Head of Human and Social Sustainability at BSI.

Skills development

The Commission found that many organisations had come to rely on recruiting people with OSH competence rather than developing it in their own employees. It says skills development is too much left to individuals rather than seen as a shared responsibility with employers and wider society. It also finds that current OSH skills systems are too biased towards paper qualifications and don’t place enough value on experience.

Its recommendations for employers and OSH professionals include helping form the next generation of competent workers by offering in-company work experience placements and apprenticeships to young people. Once in post, employees should be offered access to OSH mentors or to shadow more experienced colleagues. Employers should ring-fence resources for development, says the report. It also recommends fitting skills development to employees’ needs, through training made available in more accessible and engaging ways than traditional, generic “chalk and talk” classroom sessions.

Organisations should also pay closer attention to succession planning and phased retirement, “so that critical knowledge is retained and transferred in safety-critical and technically complex roles.”

The case for shared responsibility

Jules Robinson is RoSPA’s OSH and Falls Manager and compiled the Commission’s findings. She says the project was born out of a sense among employers, unions and professional and sector bodies that OSH competence and skills were eroding.

“Skills seem like a perennial problem, and yet it's such a foundational bit of our OSH controls and our OSH management systems,” Jules says.

The nurturing, maintenance and transfer of OSH competence between workers can’t be just hived off as the responsibility of safety and health functions, she believes. “It requires management support and HR support and OSH support. They should be asking what are we trying to teach people and why? And how are we going to allocate time and how is this going to be managed? It's not a problem that one silo can sort on their own.”

Asked which of the Skills Commission’s recommendations for organisations she thinks employers should focus on first, Jules highlights the one that is possibly the least resource intensive. “I think they should ringfence mentoring time,” she says. “From our Women in Safety programme at RoSPA, we know the value of mentoring. As a mentee, you gain skills that you would never learn from a training course, and you can't distil into a training course.” She says though it involves extra effort for the mentor, “there's this sense of purpose and worth that's attributed to it. I've heard from a lot of mentors that they get a great deal from it.”

New technology, new challenges

The Commission focuses on the rapid introduction of AI and the automation of tasks in many parts of business and their potential impact on competence - which the HSE defines as the combination of training, skills, experience and knowledge that a person needs to work safely. The report highlights the probability of human competence fading as skilled work is offloaded to machines. More consultation is needed on digital change, it says, plus stronger organisational governance, and proper attention to the impact of AI on workforce development. It also points to the risks arising from by AI being overseen by people without the critical thinking skills needed to check its outputs. It recommends the introduction of an AI “driving licence” to ensure people have the necessary training to supervise AI.

Creating a common language for skills

Another recommendation, aimed at government as well as employers, for codifying competence to make it clear what skills an individual carries with them, is the introduction of a Skills Passport.

Jules says this would be a way to help overcome the problem, identified by the Commission, that the language of job titles, and even job descriptions, is so variable; phrases describing OSH competence and duties have different meanings from organisation to organisation.

“It's probably more useful not to use the job description or the job title,” she says. “but to talk about the tasks and activities that are involved in that, and then the skills passport becomes the way that we communicate that long term, potentially like a formalised CV. We formalise the language and we formalise the description of what this task entails, and then we have a stamp to say we are either learning, learned, or mastered.”

She acknowledges that the administering such a scheme would be a big ask for public and private sector alike, but it would give recruiters and recruits alike a clear picture of whether an individual had the OSH competence needed for any job.

Since so much emphasis is now placed on the need for OSH practitioners to have good people skills, to exert influence on both shopfloor and business leaders, the commission tackled the issue of “human performance” competence, saying that organisations need to prioritise this competence as it affects everything from good appraisals to building the trust and psychological safety seen as a necessity for a mature safety culture.

What message does Jules hope the report’s audiences, employers, public bodies and sector organisations, as well as individual OSH professionals will take from the Skills Commission’s report?

“I hope it reassures people that the slide away from people as an organisational asset and skills and competence as organisational assets isn't going unnoticed, and that they're not alone,” she says.

Launching the Commission at the start of the year, Baroness Crawley said is formation presented a “wake up call” for anyone concerned about OSH competence. “Together, we have an opportunity to future‑proof OSH skills, support national productivity, and build a safer, stronger workforce,” she said.

In the coming months and years, we will see whether all the parties affected by the erosion in skills and competence use the Commission’s recommendations to take up her challenge and seize that opportunity.