Browsing by Author "Alabdullah, Hassan"

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Development of a Safety Engineering Curriculum Using a Competency Matrix Derived from Job Descriptions
(King Abdulaziz University, 2018-01-01) Alabdullah, Hassan; Zytoon, Mohammed
The safety awareness has been growing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in recent years and, consequently, the demand for safety specialists, e.g., safety engineers, significantly has increased. However, a notable shortage of safety engineers in KSA exists. Therefore, there is a need to develop educational programs that can fulfill the demand through graduating competent graduates. For such programs to be developed its essential to identify what types and levels of competencies are required to be attained by the graduates. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the quality of safety positions job description in the Saudi industries, identifying the safety engineers' competencies, developing a competency matrix to classify the competencies, and to alter an industrial engineering program to a safety engineering oriented one. For these, a total of 91 job descriptions covering 10 safety job titles and 6 industrial sectors were studied to explore the factors that may influence the quality of job description design. Overall, there were some gaps in the design of the job descriptions of safety jobs which may have negative impact on the OSH performance of the Saudi industrial and service sectors. The results showed the quality of job descriptions of safety jobs varied from one industrial sector to another, where those collected from the oil & gas, petrochemicals and utility sectors were the best. Based on the evaluated job descriptions, it was found that 13 competencies were essential for the safety engineer. Further 3 essential competencies were added from other resources. The sixteen competencies were classified into technical professional and managerial levels, and within each level the knowledge, skills and attitudes competencies were determined. Finally, these were used to develop a model curriculum for a Safety Engineering major within an Industrial Engineering Program to be established and offered in the Saudi universities. The study recommended creating a unified model for the competencies of safety engineers as well as the job descriptions of the safety engineer's jobs in Saudi Arabia.
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