Andy Shenstone, CEO at NEBOSH, outlines the organisation’s goals to support workplace safety, modernise learning methods, and extend global reach
What are the main goals of NEBOSH’s new strategy?
As the title suggests, the idea behind the ‘Developing Our Potential’ strategy is to express our desire to achieve more, reach more individuals, and protect more lives.
The core mission is to save lives and protect people at work.
We achieve this through world-class qualifications, services, and support that address both the changing and emerging needs and risks in the global workplace.
The essence of the strategy is to support exemplary regulatory compliance, which is fundamental for our qualifications.
We also aim to modernise our assessment methods to ensure they remain current and maintain the integrity of our awards.
This is particularly important with the advent of technologies like AI, which present challenges to awarding organisations in terms of assessment and its implementation.
Additionally, as a charitable organisation, we aim to do more to deliver our charitable objectives.
This involves using the reserves generated from our core activities to support health and safety in the workplace more effectively.
How will AI and technological advancements affect NEBOSH’s assessment methods?
It’s a matter of how we navigate it.
While AI is still relatively underdeveloped, it has tremendous potential to support organisations like ours, both in general administrative tasks and in our specific responsibilities as an awarding organisation.
At the same time, it presents challenges in terms of potential misuse in the learning process.
We strive for authenticity; we want authentic learners earning authentic qualifications that employers can trust.
Therefore, we must ensure that our learners and the support we provide to them maintain this authenticity and rigour.
Why is NEBOSH focusing on increasing its societal impact?
It’s a very important and distinctive component of the strategy, which hasn’t perhaps featured as prominently in previous iterations.
The rationale behind it is that all charitable organisations, including ours, achieve their objectives through a variety of activities.
Usually, this is through the core function, but when that core function, in our case as an awarding organisation, generates a surplus, the question arises: how will you use that surplus to further your charitable objectives?
We are now in a position to make choices in this direction that we weren’t previously able to, thanks to the success of what we’ve accomplished.
We will be pursuing this rigorously, both in the UK and internationally, in partnership with other organisations.
We’re not interested in reinventing the wheel or covering ground already effectively managed by partner organisations.
Instead, we aim to understand where we can make a bigger difference, whether that means supporting existing initiatives, bringing partners together to provide a framework, funding, or support, or other types of interaction.
Currently, we are designing the programme and will consult with our partners on it and plan to start initiating later this year, with significant progress expected in the second and third years of the current strategy.
How will technical infrastructure investments enhance learning and assessment?
Like many organisations, we have our share of legacy IT systems that need modernising, which is a typical path we must take.
The changing modality of learning requires us to continually assess and redesign our assessments and awarding processes.
This necessitates platforms and technology suites that can support this evolution.
Modernising our core assessment platforms is part of this rationale.
Additionally, we aim to extend our reach and work in other jurisdictions, which involves expanding our product range.
We need systems capable of supporting a larger, more complex organisation and ensuring they are fit for purpose.
There are also more obvious aspects, such as our website, which needs modernising to provide a better user and learner journey.
This will be one visible change our stakeholders can expect in the coming years.
We also aim to improve the functionality of our system that helps learners find learning partners and qualifications.
Additionally, we plan to offer more support services through the “My NEBOSH” portal for our alumni diploma holders, providing further benefits to our alumni community in the years to come.
What changes should students expect with the new online portal?
At the moment, we provide support to our alumni, particularly diploma holders.
However, we aim to extend that support and strengthen the sense of community we can offer.
First, we will provide a stronger and higher level of service support through the My NEBOSH portal.
This will include providing information to help learners progress their careers and make connections through their qualification pathways.
Additionally, we plan to offer more resources.
While we already provide a range of resources through our current portal, there is a real opportunity to strengthen this.
We also want to make these resources available to all learners, not just diploma holders but also certificate holders and those who have received non-regulated awards.
This means broadening the offer and enhancing the content of what we provide.
I am keen to ensure it is delivered in a way that is user-friendly on mobile devices, making it much more intuitive and easier to interact with than the legacy systems we currently use.
How will the new initiatives build on NEBOSH’s legacy?
It’s absolutely a foundational cornerstone of our strategy to maintain the integrity of our awards and the quality on which we have built such a strong reputation.
The foundation of our strategy focuses on ensuring regulatory compliance and the highest quality assessment processes.
This is why we are investing in technology and organisational platforms and processes.
We also aim to extend opportunities to all learners, enhancing access to our courses and programmes.
This connects to our social purpose, as we may create initiatives to address the affordability of our qualifications or extend access to parts of the world where learning is economically challenging.
We are diversifying the products we offer to make them more accessible to employers, positioning ourselves as a partner of choice in the employment community.
We are already seeing good progress in our overseas programmes, where we endorse or support employer-devised programmes.
These are embedded in courses that employees of large organisations can access.
Ultimately, we are not about chasing growth at the expense of quality.
Our focus is on quality first, second, and third.
Everything we do beyond that is built on this solid foundation, and this criterion is embedded in the DNA of our organisation.
How will NEBOSH extend its reach into more countries and sectors?
Although we are a UK-based organisation, we are internationally active, with 70% of our awards secured by overseas learners.
We currently have learners in 158 countries.
We aim to extend our reach in countries where we already have a significant presence.
For example, we will focus on building our presence in India, where we already do a lot of work, as well as in the Gulf states like the UAE and KSA.
These regions know us well, and we have a strong reputation there, so we want to build on that.
Expanding our network of learning partners in these regions is a key part of our strategy.
We also plan to strengthen relationships with the employer community to deliver directly to them.
India, now the most populous country on Earth since last summer, presents a significant opportunity.
We aim to support the growth of high-quality OSH provision within the Indian employment community in partnership with the Indian government and local jurisdictions.
To ensure our qualifications are fit for purpose in different environments, we might need to adapt our offerings.
This could mean more work at the entry level to build towards the more demanding certificates and diplomas.
The challenge is to contextualise our courses without diminishing their quality, which requires careful navigation.
What challenges do you foresee in implementing this strategy?
A critical challenge for us is building and securing relationships with partners that share our values.
This means working with organisations that embrace quality and the intent of our awards, which is to save lives.
We view this as an opportunity to constructively develop a culture within the workplace that rightly prioritises the safety of employees.
Our goal is for people to come home from work as healthy as they were when they arrived.
To achieve this, we must take the time to build the right relationships.
It’s easy to enter a market with our reputation and have organisations eager to work with us.
However, we need to ensure their motivations align with ours, which requires a thoughtful, iterative process.
This process is not fast and will take years, but that’s a positive because we want to ensure the foundations are solid.
What future developments might we expect from NEBOSH beyond the 2024-2027 strategic plan?
Part of the answer to that question depends on how well we achieve the goals set out in this strategy: if we are successful, it will naturally prompt us to reflect on how the organisation can develop even more substantially in our international work.
First things first, we have a lot to accomplish in the next three years.
Some of these goals I’m confident we will achieve, while others may take a bit longer as we might have been initially overly ambitious.
It’s also important to consider that the environment can change, meaning what seemed appropriate at one time may no longer be suitable a year later.
If we are successful, it will be about building on that success while maintaining our core values of quality and being clear about our purpose.
Our aim is to provide qualifications that are very applied, supporting workplace cultures that embrace health and safety.
We want to push these values and opportunities even further into the international world of work.
This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of International Fire & Safety Journal. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.