Building a Successful Career in Safety: Skills, Tech, and the Art of Influence

 A goal without a plan is just a dream. Set the goal, put a plan in place, then it comes down to hard work — nobody out there cares about your career as much as you do.

- James Irwin

About this session

The average person spends roughly 80,000 hours of their life at work, yet far too many safety professionals let their careers be shaped by default rather than by design.

In this session of Safety Voices, Julian Taylor sits down with James Irwin, Director at Irwin and Colton and an active member of the IOSH Nominations Committee, to talk about what actually separates safety professionals who thrive from those who stagnate. Drawing on nearly twenty years of recruitment, James shared the patterns he sees time and again in the people who build genuinely fulfilling, influential careers in safety.

The conversation moves beyond technical qualifications, covering goal-setting, mentorship, personal brand, the role of AI in job applications, and why James believes every safety role carries an element of sales.

Key takeaways from the session

• The 80,000-hour mindset: why so many safety careers happen “by luck, blown by the wind,” rather than by design, and why treating your career as intentionally as any major project changes the trajectory.

• Goals before plans: James's case for setting specific, focused career goals first, and how clarity of focus makes opportunities visible that were there all along.

•  What actually gets people hired: : at senior level, roughly 95% of a hiring conversation is about personality fit and proven experience influencing, engaging, and driving cultural change; qualifications are typically a given, not the differentiator.

• Mentors and networks: why mentoring is an “untapped resource” most senior leaders are genuinely glad to be asked for, how to approach it well, and why face-to-face connection still matters in a Teams-and-Zoom world.

• Authentic personal brand: reframed simply as “what people say about you when you're not in the room”, personal brand and authenticity matters more than ever as AI flattens candidates into looking the same.

• Technology, data, and safety skills: why digital literacy and confident AI prompting are becoming baseline skills for safety professionals.

• Learning how to sell in a Safety role: why the best safety professionals have salespeople skills, seeking first to understand, then to be understood — and why that applies from the shop floor to the boardroom.
  
• Why organisations lose Safety talents: the common threads behind low turnover teams (investment in learning and development, real ownership and empowerment, and interesting work) versus the usual culprits of poor pay, lack of progression, and weak senior buy-in.