Adding value

It will come as no surprise that I’m a passionate advocate for the value of professional bodies. They play an incredibly important role in supporting members with their professional goals and development, and the drive for excellence through robust standards.

They provide members with networks, tools, content and resources to support them to be the best professionals they can be. More broadly, they speak on behalf of their profession – to society and governments – to ensure the voice of members can really influence where it’s needed.

With that in mind, the decision to join IOSH was an easy one. And it’s an exciting time to join as we are on a journey to ensure we support our members and the OSH profession now and into the future.

I speak more about this in my interview on page 37, but the OSH profession has become more visible and more recognised than ever as one that enables businesses to succeed. It is important that this continues, and IOSH will be there alongside its members.

I am now a few months into my role at IOSH. People naturally ask me what I hope to achieve in that role and one of my main answers is around ensuring we provide value and support for our members.

As a professional body with over 48,000 members, it is important we ensure those members are engaged with their Institution and feel able to progress and become recognised through Chartership too, if that is one of their career goals.

Alongside that, it’s about how we open up our membership to become truly global, and to be more diverse and inclusive. This will be key as we move forward and will run right through our next strategy and everything IOSH does.

Development of that next strategy is in full swing and we will provide more information on that later in the year. But in the more immediate future, we are fully focused on ensuring we deliver on the key pieces of work we set out to do with our existing strategy, WORK 2022.

While I’m still relatively new to IOSH, I can see that a huge amount of work has gone into the delivery of WORK 2022 over the past few years and it’s great to see so many of the ambitions come to fruition.

That work has included IOSH transforming itself into an agile organisation that is able to respond to change. That was evident in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and I’m sure we are well equipped to respond to any future challenges in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – or VUCA as you may know it – environment we operate in.

Nicole Rinaldi | Director of professional services, IOSH