For its part, IOHA thought that the
Academy’s list was too American-centric
and could not apply to countries where
industrial hygiene resources were scarce.
Finding out how to accomplish industrial hygiene work in those countries is a
growing problem for many multinational
companies. The Academy and IOHA are
currently working to create a unified
vision of competencies from entry- to
senior-level IH practitioners.
Glenn Fishler, president and CEO of
the consulting firm EORM, has seen
firsthand how global trends have
changed the professional landscape for
industrial hygienists, requiring a far different set of skills than most practitioners expected when they entered the
profession. A growing number of
EORM’s 350-plus customers operate facilities around the world.
“We’re seeing it more and more,
where a global customer needs some-
thing done overseas, and expects that we
will find the appropriate resources to
provide services with the same standard
of care as in the United States. It’s our
job to meet that challenge,” Fishler says.
“There are countries where there are very
few or no CIHs available to provide serv-
ices. That presents a problem when
you’re trying to accomplish industrial
hygiene work around the world. How do
you know that the quality of the work,
the standards of care are going to be the
same? Because it’s in another country,
do you reduce the standard of care of
how the work gets done? No, I don’t
think so. This creates opportunity for
growth and development of EHS careers
and services in the global economy.”
Concern about the standard of care
resonates with Lindsay Booher, who, as
AIHA president in 2008, asked the Acad-
emy to embark on its core competencies
project. For Booher, the question of
whether to apply a less protective stan-
dard to projects undertaken in countries
with few practicing industrial hygienists
is one of ethics.
“Our professional code of ethics in-
cludes a requirement that we practice
only within our areas of competence,”
Booher says. “I think we should be unre-
lenting in saying that if you’re going to
be the expert evaluating an employee’s
exposure to a health hazard, like benzene
or asbestos or radiation, you need to know
what you’re doing. There’s a minimum set
of competencies that you need to practice
effectively wherever you are in the world.
And we should not be compromising on
these core competencies.”
Booher acknowledges that the lack of
trained industrial hygienists is a major
challenge in many areas of the world.
Still, he believes that the profession
should insist on high standards of prac-
tice to protect worker health everywhere.
Business Language
The CIH exam, administered by the
American Board of Industrial Hygiene
(ABIH), has long been the arbiter of what
minimally competent practitioners need
to know to begin a career in industrial
hygiene. As an accredited certification
organization, ABIH is required to conduct a job analysis for industrial hygiene
every five years. A panel of approximately 10 professionals representing different kinds of employers prepares the
analysis, which ABIH sends to a much
larger group for review. Once validated,
the analysis becomes the blueprint for
the CIH exam.
The IH Life Cycle | FEATURE
“If we look at the very broad defini-
tion of industrial hygiene—anticipation,
recognition, evaluation and control of
workplace and community hazards—that
inherently has not changed over the
years,” says ABIH Executive Director
Lynn O’Donnell. “What has changed?
Certainly the way we do air sampling
now for certain things is not the way we
did it forty years ago. Equipment has
changed. New information shows that
something we considered a hazard isn’t
as hazardous as we thought, or we may
find that it is more hazardous.”
Still, while the basics may have stayed
more or less constant, the industrial hy-
gienist’s role in companies has changed
dramatically.
“Twenty to forty years ago, IHs were
very siloed in the workplace,” says Walt
Rostykus, vice president of Humantech,
an ergonomics consulting company.
“Today, industrial hygienists still need to
have a core knowledge of industrial hy-
giene, but they cannot be isolated from
other functions in the EHS field. There’s
too much that overlaps with occupational
safety, too much that overlaps with envi-
ronmental health. The parameters of the
job can no longer be as restrictive as
they’ve been in the past.”
In particular, Rostykus says today’s
industrial hygienists must know the lan-
guage of business. This means not only
recognizing plant managers’ concerns
with profit and productivity but under-
standing the core principles and initiatives
that motivate the business as a whole. For
many companies, those initiatives include
lean manufacturing, a production process
that attempts to eliminate waste—that is,
anything that does not contribute to a
product’s value. Industrial hygienists
whose companies operate on lean princi-
ples can make a better case for protecting
workers if they emphasize that their pro-
posed interventions not only meet best
practices and comply with regulations
but are consistent with the organization’s
embrace of efficiency.
“You’ve got to understand your customer,” Rostykus says. “You’ve got to
find out what’s motivating them, and
you’ve got to address that motivation.
If you help them address their pressing
needs, then they’re more likely to listen
when you say, There’s a chance of somebody losing their hearing, or This exposure exceeds the PEL.”
