[Mary] Hi, folks, welcome to Safety Labs. Today's guest has the benefit of a long career in safety, where she's seen ideas come in and out of favor, actively participated in safety education, and formed her own opinions of where safety has been, where it is now, and where she believes it must go. We'll talk about all that, including some potentially unpopular opinions.
Leslie Stockel is an associate professor at Oklahoma State University in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology. She holds a PhD from Texas Tech University, a Master of Science in Engineering Technology Management, and a Bachelor of Science in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology. Leslie has been a professional member of ASSP since 1993, holding numerous leadership positions. She's won several awards, including being named by ASSP as the 2024 William E. Tarrants Outstanding Safety Educator. In 2025, Leslie was named a Fellow of the American Society of Safety Professionals, recognizing her career achievements in occupational safety and health. Leslie joins us from Stillwater, Oklahoma. Welcome.
[Leslie] Hi, thanks. Thanks for having me, and I'm happy to be here.
[Mary] Great. Let's start by looking backwards a little. Can you give a brief history — I know you teach an entire course in this — but a brief history of occupational safety, and maybe contextualize the roles of Heinrich, Frederick Taylor, and Frank Bird?
[Leslie] Sure. If you look at the evolution of safety management theories and practices, they very closely follow general management theories and practices, going all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. If you take yourself back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, when the factory system was starting to gain popularity in both the US and Europe, the barons of industry were trying to figure out how to manage this massive growth. Several key individuals came along during that time to put forth ideas to help business leaders manage it. One of the first was Frederick Taylor — the father of scientific management, which is basically what we know today as procedures. Everything you do in an organization, you have a procedure for it, laid out step by step so anyone can follow it, leading to consistency. Taylor proposed this scientific study of tasks — though he wasn't particularly concerned about worker safety, mostly efficiency. He came up with time-motion studies and standardization of work, so everyone does the work the same way. He did an early study on how to use a shovel, and came up with the most efficient way to use one to get the most volume in the shortest time.
Along with that came selection of the worker, fit for the job, and training, and division of labor — breaking work into small tasks so more people could be more efficient doing more things. He was also an early proponent of performance-based incentives — being paid by the piece, the more shovels you dig, the more you get paid. Great for productivity, not so great for worker human factors, ergonomics, and safety, as we learned many years later. These early Taylor principles led to what we have today in safety with safe operating procedures — even job hazard analysis, a method about as old as Taylor, takes that idea of breaking work into small steps, evaluating risk, and addressing ergonomic issues, looking at worker movement and so on.
That was the first real management theory, and what we see in our field, one of the things we talk about, is someone comes up with a management theory that supposedly makes businesses more productive and profitable — it's probably a good idea, and it probably works in some places, but it doesn't work everywhere and it doesn't work forever. What tends to happen in safety is someone takes that management theory and adapts it to improve safety. That's not a bad idea, because as safety professionals, we have to speak the language of our bosses to get them to listen to us — if our bosses are excited about scientific management, we need to show them we can use these same principles to improve worker safety too.
Frederick Taylor was one of the earliest, but there were others. Henri Fayol came up with administrative management — this is honestly where the org chart was born, breaking the functions of a business into human resources, operations, finance, engineering, and so on. It takes a rapidly growing, expanding company and breaks it down into small steps. Once businesses start hiring people, they realize they need to manage their workers, because if they don't, they won't get as much productivity. It's around this time we start talking about human factors and what motivates employees. Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes into play — we can't expect workers to care about self-actualization if they don't have basic needs like safety and security met. All of this moves along with the development of each management theory.
Then there's Douglas McGregor, who proposed Theory X and Theory Y managers — a Theory X manager is a dictator, assumes the worst about workers, rules with an iron fist, "my way or the highway." A Theory Y manager assumes employees want to do the right thing, want to come to work and do a good job. There's a conflict between those two views, and even today, in any workplace, we have managers who fall into both categories — it's a challenge for leadership, how to get the most out of people with these differing management philosophies.
Moving forward to the twenties and thirties, we get to Heinrich. He was an engineer, an insurance guy, and he'd served in the armed forces — I think it might have been the Navy. He worked his way up from being a laborer to an engineer, but he was primarily an insurance guy, and a lot of the studies and writing he did were based on insurance cases he evaluated or investigated as an insurance safety man — nowadays we'd call them risk control engineers, but back then they might have just called them safety engineers. Right now it's sort of in vogue to dismiss Heinrich, to say he was wrong, that his data can't be revalidated — though I'm not sure that's entirely true, because there were follow-up studies. Frank Bird did some studies in the sixties and seventies and created that pyramid structure statistically, and certain corporate companies did their own internal studies and arrived at that same pyramid shape — a few very serious events, a lot more non-serious events, and a lot more near misses, unsafe acts, at-risk situations that possibly don't even get recorded. I think that structure still holds up.
Where people get crossways with Heinrich is treating the pyramid as a causative model — meaning the things that cause fatalities are the same things that cause the mid-level events or the first-aid cases and near misses. That doesn't hold up, but I don't think that's what Heinrich meant when he came up with the pyramid. I actually have a copy, I think a second edition, of Heinrich's book, and he talks about this — he has a separate incident causation model that's different from the pyramid. If you read his text, he was saying the pyramid is descriptive, not causative. What he was trying to convey — and you have to remember, at the time, companies weren't doing anything if it wasn't a fatality, anything less and it was basically, "nice working with you, see you later," because this was before modern workers' comp — was that you need to pay attention not just to fatalities, but to these lower-level events, because you're having a lot more of them, and if you take those seriously, theoretically the fatalities should decrease.
Now, statistically, that's not quite happening today, and I think there are reasons for that. If you look at the chart that everyone who's been to a safety conference has seen — fatalities have slowly edged up, spiked, and are now going down, bouncing up and down over the last few years — but non-fatal injuries are continuing to trend down at a very steady pace, which flies in the face of Heinrich's ideas. But Heinrich didn't have OSHA recordkeeping or workers' comp. This is a personal belief, I don't have data to support it, but I think the way we manage workers' comp cases and OSHA recording, in order to keep things out of the system, is part of the reason for this gap between injuries and fatalities. You can't hide a fatality — if someone is killed in your workplace, you have to report it, it's the law. But you can manipulate your way out of reporting a first-aid case — we don't have to report those at all, and there's a very fine line in deciding whether something was a first-aid case or a recordable, regardless of the actual severity of the event. So I think the idea that Heinrich was simply "wrong" is a bit misguided — and misunderstanding Heinrich is itself a misunderstanding. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater — we want to take Heinrich's information and use it, while keeping in mind that times have changed, and we have very different laws governing how businesses operate now.
If you look at Heinrich's original causation model, it was basically a behavior-based safety model — he had eighty-eight percent unsafe acts, ten percent unsafe conditions, and allowed two percent for pure randomness. We still use that today, even with behavior-based safety and human error prevention — Heinrich was onto that even back then.
Heinrich's been pretty much the standard for a long time, and I agree we always need to be evaluating and coming up with new ideas. Frank Bird, also an insurance guy, working in the sixties and seventies, validated some of Heinrich's thinking. Heinrich came up with the domino theory of accident causation — dominoes stacked up, one falls, the next falls, a linear chain of events. One criticism I do have of Heinrich is that he was very focused on the fault of the worker — though you have to remember, this was the 1930s, we've evolved since then. Bird took that domino theory and turned it — it's not a worker problem at each domino, it's a system problem. That was very interesting, because it shifted how we looked at incidents, as system and management failures rather than worker failures — profound for the sixties and seventies, and a lot of people still use Bird's concept of "loss of control." When an incident occurs, if you walk backward in time through each event, there was a loss of control at some point, and if you can find where that started, you can find the root causes.
Moving forward again, Bird and this idea of loss of control led us into behavior-based safety, using principles of behavioral psychology to help manage workers. That's a bit controversial now too, because I think behavior-based safety was promised, by the people promoting it, to be the silver bullet — get a good behavior-based safety program going, and it'll solve all your problems. And I think none of these things will ever change everything. I worked in several places either implementing behavior-based safety or running it — I won't say it was functioning well everywhere, but it was functioning. I think one of the negative reasons behavior-based safety didn't deliver the promised land of injury prevention is that people didn't really implement it well. If you read Krause, or Scott Geller — the two big behavior-based safety thought leaders when it first came on the scene — they were emphatic: don't use this as a way to punish people. You do your safety observation, give feedback positively, collect data, track it for large-scale analysis, but you do not use an at-risk behavior as a weapon to punish someone. Scott Geller is the guy who coined the phrase "actively care" — you have to actively care for your workers if you want them engaged in your safety culture. He was saying that thirty years ago.
What tends to happen with these promised methods is that no one gives it enough time to fully implement, fully engage, fully change the culture — which can take up to fifteen years. Business leaders want immediate results — they have to go to shareholder meetings, board meetings, they want things to happen. Honestly, after about two years, if you haven't shown decent, promotable results, business leaders, VPs, the C-suite, lose interest and move on to the next thing — they go to a conference, hear about the next big idea, and it's on to that. After behavior-based safety came human performance and human error prevention. A lot of the principles there are excellent academically, or just as good ideas — instead of blaming the worker, figure out why they made the mistake, what conditions put them in a position for that error to occur. Wonderful stuff. The problem is we don't give it time before the next thing comes along and everybody runs to that. I don't think there's a silver bullet for safety.
Something I learned in my master's program in engineering management — we read a lot of the same authors MBAs read — was in a strategic performance improvement class, where the professor said something that's stuck with me ever since: everything will work somewhere, nothing works everywhere; everything will work for a period of time, nothing will work forever. That was it, exactly. At the time I was working in a utility facility, struggling with all the things people struggle with — before we could even fully implement and run behavior-based safety effectively, leadership said, "no, we have to pivot, we have to go to human error prevention now." And I thought, okay, it's a good idea, I like it, but we never even finished behavior-based safety. And it continues — now people are talking about energy-based safety, Safety-I and Safety-II, now Safety III. The cycle just keeps turning. I don't think there's a silver bullet — an individual facility or organization has to figure out what's going to work for them, and I wish leaders would give it time to really stick before moving on to something else.
[Mary] You've answered a bunch of questions I had, which is great. Last time we spoke, you talked about two realms of safety, technical and cultural. Can you define those, and maybe what your current concerns are?
[Leslie] Sure. Traditional, old-school safety engineering work was very technical — go out, evaluate equipment, inspect, put up guards. At one place I worked, we talked about it as "hearts and minds" and "hands and feet." The hands and feet of safety is the technical side — doing your lockout/tagout before working on equipment, doing a proper confined-space prep and entry procedure, doing an electrical safe work permit, ensuring everyone has the appropriate PPE and wears it, all the necessary training. All those technical, day-to-day, tactical things we do for safety.
Then there's the hearts and minds — getting people to buy into safety, the cultural aspect — getting leaders to buy in, getting workers to buy in, allowing workers to feel safe enough to ask questions or decline a task because they're worried about safety, without fear of retribution. It's also about safety professionals being taken seriously in the workplace. Today we talk a lot about psychological safety, people feeling emotionally safe at work — all good things, no argument there. But I worry, if you go to safety conferences these days, everyone's talking about psychological, cultural, emotional safety — great things, I don't say anything negative about them — but I worry that we're neglecting the technical, that we have people who've mastered the people-skills side of safety but lack the technical side. That's going to get somebody killed.
You see this a lot in discourse on social media among safety professionals and at conferences — I've had numerous safety managers tell me, "I'd rather hire someone with good people skills than technical skills, because I can teach them the technical skills." I've worked with fellow safety professionals who were very nice people, could get along with anyone, but really didn't know what they were doing technically — they didn't have the base of technical knowledge to make good decisions in the workplace. A person like that is going to get somebody killed. I don't think it's an either-or proposition — a good, effective safety professional needs both strong technical skills and good people skills for that cultural environment. Both can be taught. You can learn the technical stuff with the right education, training, practice, and experience — that's what certifications tell us. But you can also learn people skills — there's so much out there. Dale Carnegie is old, from the thirties, but if you read "How to Win Friends and Influence People," it has 100% application today, and those skills can be taught. I worry when we start sacrificing technical skills for people skills. They're two sides of the same coin — you've got to have both, and neither is more important than the other. There's a balance, and my concern is that we're getting out of balance.
[Mary] Why do you think that's happening — any theories on why people might be focusing more on one side than the other?
[Leslie] I'd say technical safety is kind of boring — it's drudgery, tedious. There's nothing exciting about confined-space inspections or air sampling, nothing exciting about writing a lockout/tagout procedure. But it's that tedium, that attention to detail, that makes the difference between someone living and someone dying. When we talk about the softer skills, I love a good TED talk as much as anybody — one of my favorite parts of any safety conference is the keynote, inspirational, gives us things to think about and aspire to. It's just more exciting, so people gravitate toward it and away from "I've got a checklist, and it has to be thorough, and I have to do it every time, and I can't pencil-whip it." I get bored with that too. But we can't forget about it.
I think we need to make sure our young, up-and-coming safety professionals get a strong technical foundation. People like me, who've been around a while, came up in the technical age of safety, because OSHA was new, regulations were coming out, codes and standards — we had a real strong foundation there, and then migrated into the softer side. I think younger people are coming up on the softer side first, and I don't know if they're getting the technical grounding they need. I'm sure there are pockets of excellence and pockets that need improvement, but I don't want us to become so focused on the soft side of safety that we forget what's going to get somebody killed. Go back to the fact that fatalities are rising — we need to be very aware of that, and look at the reasons people are getting killed or seriously injured. That's not happening because someone's feelings got hurt, or because someone's a jerk — it's happening because people aren't paying attention to the technical. I'm a little unpopular in that mindset, because everybody loves the softer side of safety — I love it too — but it's two sides of a coin, and we need both.
[Mary] It may be a pendulum thing, where technical was very strong, and now it's swinging the other way — maybe too far, and we all hope it ends up in the middle eventually.
[Leslie] Yes, I hope so too.
[Mary] You mentioned the silver bullet approach, and I wanted to dig into that more — for anyone who hasn't heard the expression, it's a solution that supposedly solves everything, everywhere. Executives will often hire consultants to come in and work on the culture, but they rarely get the results they're hoping for. Why do you think that is? You've already mentioned time — any other factors?
[Leslie] This is a connection I haven't fully made until now, but I'm starting to think about it. If you think about the cycle of a business opportunity, or even a product line — fifty years ago, automobiles, heavy chemicals, oil and gas, those things had a pretty long cycle time, maybe even five years before any drastic changes occurred. There was time to slowly implement things, versus now, where a new product comes out every eighteen months or less — think about your cell phone, there's no five-year gap between major changes in how a company does business. With AI coming into the workplace, that's going to speed up even faster. I don't blame the executives — they're trying to keep investors happy, the board happy, keep the company afloat and profitable, managing a lot of things, but on a much faster cycle than in years past. So they want fast results. Unfortunately, when we're talking about people, it's very difficult to change a culture rapidly. I remember reading that it truly does take fifteen years to drastically change a culture, and no one has that much time.
This makes my argument for why we should stop looking for a silver bullet and start looking for short, incremental improvements over time, because you don't have time to wholesale throw out your old safety system and start a new one — you have to train everybody, write all the programs and procedures, and change the mindsets of the holdouts who naturally resist change. We've got to get out of this mindset of, "I went to this conference, bought this package, and if we implement it, it'll change everything." That's not a sustainable path. The principles of continuous improvement tell us we shouldn't do that — we should have an iterative process of small improvements over time.
[Mary] I was thinking about that, and you mentioned in our last discussion how branding can almost hurt a safety idea — which made me think of the saying about musicians, "I love the music, I can't stand the fans." We were talking about what you're seeing around Mike Rowe and Safety Third. To paraphrase what you said, not putting words directly in your mouth — someone shows up in a Safety Third shirt and then thinks they don't have to follow the rules. But it wasn't an evaluation of the idea itself being good, bad, or ugly — it was about how people interact with the idea.
[Leslie] Right. And I'll say what I said before — I think Mike Rowe is amazing, and what he's done for the labor force and blue-collar working professions is amazing. He's drawn attention to something that needed it for a long time, and I applaud him for that. When I first heard this, I'll tell you a story about a student. He was doing his senior project, which involved live fire burns, testing ideas around fire growth, fire spread, and sprinkler systems. One of the things we require students to do with their senior project is a risk assessment — what are the risks, what are you going to do to protect yourself and the people around you. It was an excellent project, but he was a little flippant — at the end, talking about the risk assessment, he said, "well, if we run into problems, we'll just safety-third it." I said, what are you talking about? And of course, me, I don't believe in safety first, I believe in safety always.
So I started digging into it, and found that Mike Rowe wrote a white paper on it, has podcast episodes and videos about it. What he's actually saying is 100% spot on and makes a lot of sense — basically, when you take people's brains out of a situation, when you have all these procedures and expect workers to blindly follow them, you take away their self-awareness and self-risk-assessment ability. He's saying safety shouldn't be first — and this is where we agree — safety should always be: you look out for yourself first, then your coworkers, then whatever it is you're doing. In his materials, he calls it Safety Third, and I believe what he says is exactly right. But the problem is, he sells stickers, t-shirts, hats — and people who haven't read a word of what he actually says, who don't fully understand what he means by Safety Third, just like this student who hadn't read his materials, think it sounds funny and throw it on their presentation.
I think he was kind of trying to get my goat a little bit too, because the students all know I'm very passionate about their safety and about safety as a topic generally. He couldn't actually tell me what he meant. So I take a little exception to what Mike Rowe is doing there — stop selling the t-shirts, man, or give it a different name, a different brand, because people are buying the t-shirts and hats because they think it sounds cool, without understanding what he's actually talking about, or without taking the time to understand it.
[Mary] Similar to what you were saying about Heinrich.
[Leslie] Yeah, exactly that. It mixes the message, changes it.
[Mary] We've misunderstood the symbol — the pyramid wasn't an accident causation model, but we sort of adopted it as one, because no one actually read what Heinrich had to say about it.
[Leslie] You're right, it's exactly Heinrich again. So, Mike Rowe, if you're listening — I think you're great, and I love what you have to say about the ideas behind Safety Third. I just think people are wearing the t-shirts without the right understanding.
[Mary] Love the music, can't stand the fans. Okay, let's move to safety education, since that's a big part of your career. You've said you love your program, that it's the best in the world. How does it stand out from other safety programs?
[Leslie] Let me fully acknowledge my bias — I'm an Oklahoma State Cowboys fan, dyed in the wool, if you cut me, I bleed orange. I love my program, I think it's amazing. It has a good blend of the technical — because we're an Engineering Technology degree, accredited for engineering technology, we have a very strong foundation in the technical side of safety. Our students can and do take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, pass it, and become professional engineers if they choose. What makes us stand out, I think, with an engineering technology degree, is the hands-on element — most of our major-related classes have labs where we actually go out, three-hour blocks of time crawling around in confined spaces and excavations, operating cranes, using fall protection equipment, then going on tours of actual industrial, construction, manufacturing, and oil and gas sites. I believe that combination of academic learning and hands-on learning is what sets us apart. I'm sure there are other programs that do hands-on activities too, but our students literally set things on fire and have to put them out, build a room and figure out how to keep it from burning — they get dirty, wet, and use tools.
[Mary] Of course you can't necessarily compare to everyone, but you're immensely proud of what you do, and you feel your students are really well prepared for their future safety roles. In what ways are they prepared? Do you have any stories about former students who've come back and talked to you about that?
[Leslie] Sure. We embed some OSHA training into our courses, so students can get an OSHA 30 card in one of our classes — many other universities do that too, so that's not unique to us — but they also get a construction card, and we do some hazmat work with HAZWOPER. They get a strong technical foundation. Our program is also very popular with employers, so our students are very much in demand — they can get internships after their freshman year, which is kind of unheard of, especially compared to other engineering disciplines like mechanical or chemical, where you might not get an internship until between junior and senior year. If our students have good people skills, they can get an internship freshman year, meaning three summers of experience by graduation, which gives them a real competitive advantage.
We're also a Qualified Academic Program through the BCSP, the Board of Certified Safety Professionals — again, not unique to us, but we map our curriculum to the CSP blueprint, so when students graduate they have a strong foundation for the ASP and eventually the CSP. After they get four years of experience, many of them pass the CSP exam along with the Fundamentals of Engineering exam.
As for stories — a couple come to mind. I had a student a few years ago who did his senior project on creating hazard identification training modules, to test whether people could look at a set of equipment, tools, or an operation and identify the hazards. He and a team of four built rolling platforms — they scoured garage sales and estate sales for months looking for broken tools, broken drills, saws, chisels, punches — built a tool bench cart, a confined space cart, an electrical cart, brought in student volunteers, and assessed whether people could identify the hazards. It was a pretty successful, hands-on, popular project when they presented it. He went on to get a job at an oil refinery, and was actually able to secure a multimillion-dollar contract project within the company to create a similar mobile training module to be used company-wide. When he called and said, "guess what, they're giving me all this money, we don't have to scrounge garage sales anymore, we can actually get it really well done," I was thrilled for him. I think that company still uses those training modules to this day.
Another story — something we do in our classes: in their last semester, students take a class called Risk Control Engineering, and at the very start of the semester, I hand them a CSP blueprint, everything they're supposed to know to test on, and a Fundamentals of Engineering blueprint, and a highlighter, and ask them to highlight everything they're already familiar with from the past four years. Sometimes, in the moment, a student is thinking, "why do we have to learn this, this is hard, why do I need to know this" — but they start highlighting, and highlighting, and end up with most of it highlighted, very few gaps, and they're like, "wow, I guess I really did learn some stuff here." It's a bit of an eye-opening experience heading into that final semester.
The last thing I'll share — among the faculty here at Oklahoma State, we have a running joke: how long does it take a student to call you back and tell you that you were right about whatever you were teaching them, after they'd told you it was ridiculous and unnecessary? My quickest is two weeks — usually it's somewhere between a month and six months. I had a student call two weeks into their job and say, "remember that presentation, that lecture you did on such-and-such, would you be willing to share that with me, because now I have to deal with it." Actually, it's even shorter than two weeks now — I had a student on his internship last summer call and say, "we talked about step potential, when you hit an overhead power line with a crane or backhoe and the step potential goes into the ground, which is very dangerous — we had that happen, I'm working on the investigative training, can you share some of that with me?" Of course, absolutely.
I often tell students, when you're eyeball-deep in electrical standards, NFPA 70, 70E, 70B, and OSHA regulations, it's hard to realize this is going to help you someday — but if you trust me, I promise, one day something will happen, or there'll be a conversation, and you'll think, wait a minute, I learned something about that. You may not remember it exactly, but at least you'll know where to go look it up. I don't know that this makes OSU unique — I think other schools probably have similar situations — but I feel pretty proud of our students when they graduate. We've had some do pretty amazing things over the years. We're a pretty old program — we've been around since 1937. One of our graduates was on the Chemical Safety Board for a number of years. I myself was on the board of directors of BCSP. We've had multiple graduates on the board of directors of ASSP, and graduates serving on a couple of OSHA's industry committees. Our graduates tend to rise to the top throughout their careers — it's a pretty common thing.
[Mary] That's great, and it's great that they can reach out to you after graduation — I think that's super useful, both to reinforce that yes, you were right, but also so they know they have that resource, which isn't available to everyone after they graduate.
[Leslie] We maintain a fairly extensive alumni network, with communication venues we use — an email listserv where people post technical questions, and other things, reunions, football tailgates, but also technical issues. People stay connected. I think that's somewhat unique even at OSU — I don't think chemical engineering or mechanical engineering have as close a connected alumni network as we do. I think it's our history — a long tradition that just kind of perpetuates itself.
[Mary] We started the interview talking about history, how things developed, and then talked a bit about the moment the safety profession is in now. If you had to boil down your advice to safety practitioners — or to the profession at large, in this moment — what's one actionable step you'd recommend, knowing there's no universal answer, to improve their safety practice?
[Leslie] How can I say this politely — look in the mirror, and ask yourself, where am I not as strong as I should be? That's actually very hard for a person to do, to admit their weaknesses, and I'm no different. But you can't get better unless you know where your gaps are. If you apply the practice of safety to yourself — how do we improve a safety program, a safety system, a culture? We do an assessment, figure out where the weak points are, then take corrective action. Do that to yourself. If you're someone who's great with people, all personality, everybody loves you, but you don't know much about the technical issues, there are courses you can take, learning you can do. And the reverse is true — if you know everything there is to know about the technical side of safety, but no one wants to talk to you because you're kind of a jerk, look in the mirror and figure out how you can improve. There are resources for that too — Dale Carnegie training through the BCSP, all kinds of training through ASSP, even just the twenty most popular TED talks, free on YouTube, you can learn a lot from those. Look at yourself, identify your weaknesses, and commit to always improving. I'm near the end of my career, in the twilight of it, I suppose, but even I'm trying every day to figure out how to teach my classes better, how to put forth new ideas into the discourse. I'm far from perfect, but you've just got to keep learning, keep trying, keep improving. No one's going to have it all together all the time.
[Mary] If you could go back to the beginning of your safety career, is there a particular piece of advice you'd give yourself?
[Leslie] I'd say I've grown into my people skills — I'll be honest, I'm an introvert, a nerd, a super dork by nature, and I struggled with people skills in those early years. Here's the thing I've learned about college students, they don't really like being told what to do, so I might have told myself this advice, but I'm not sure I would have listened. But I wish I'd figured out earlier that it's not just about being technically strong, you also need to be able to communicate well. I was never a jerk to anybody, but I think what I was, was passive and uncertain of myself — I'd hang back and not assert myself, because I was afraid. Some of that comes with maturity, I think. But I'd tell that young woman, you know what you're talking about — get in there, but do it in a way that people want to hear it.
[Mary] Are there any resources, beyond what you've already mentioned, that you'd recommend to listeners — books, websites, events?
[Leslie] There are lots of conferences — the annual ASSP conference, the BCSP now has a Research Summit every other year, and a Global Learning Summit too, which is nice because if you can't travel, you can attend virtually. Also your local ASSP chapters and the National Safety Council — sometimes I prefer a smaller, local, one-day conference with a handful of speakers, just for that interpersonal connection on a smaller scale. Let me plug ASSP for a second — you should be a member, and you should go to your local chapter meetings, because that's where you meet people doing the same things, having the same struggles. That's probably been one of the best blessings of my career — I was pretty active in my local chapter everywhere I've lived. That's where you make connections, network with people — because in your workplace, you might be the only person in safety, or one of a small group, and it can get isolating, but in an ASSP chapter, everyone's a safety person, everyone's having the same struggles, and that's where you can network.
I'd also say, get your certifications — the gold standard is the CSP through the BCSP, but there are others depending on what you're doing — you might want a Construction Health and Safety Technician credential, or a CIH, or a Certified Hazardous Materials Manager, or pursue OSHA certifications. All good things — I don't think anybody needs all of them, but pursue what's right for you at this point in your career, and that may change five years from now. Be active in your local chapters, be active with your certifications, and never stop learning. As for resources, OSHA's website, BCSP's website, ASSP's website — and even LinkedIn, there's a lot of good information there, though you have to be careful, there's also a lot of junk.
[Mary] Speaking of LinkedIn, where can our listeners find you on the web, if they'd like to reach out?
[Leslie] I have a LinkedIn profile, you can find me there. You can also find me on the Oklahoma State website, okstate.edu, search for Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology. I'd also like to plug, for a second, that we just launched a fully online program, where you can get our degree in an online format. We're doing some pretty cool things with virtual reality and augmented reality for those physical hands-on labs I was bragging about — one of the challenges has always been how to deliver those labs online, but we now have a virtual studio, and one of our professors is doing some pretty cool things creating virtual environments where you can have basically the same experience as an on-campus student, in a virtual way. In-person is better, we understand that, but some people don't have the option to pack up and move to Stillwater, Oklahoma to go to college — their life situation won't allow for it — and we want to make this education available to them in a different, but equally strong, way. So anyone out there thinking about a bachelor's degree from a Qualified Academic Program, who needs to do it online, give us a consideration — I think you'll be happy with it.
[Mary] Well, that's all for today's discussion. Thanks so much for joining me, Leslie.
[Leslie] Thank you, it was great to be on, and I look forward to hearing more about you and seeing the podcast go out there. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you guys, and y'all have a great rest of your day.
[Mary] And thank you to our listeners — if you'd like to help us out, leave a quick rating or review wherever you listen to the podcast, or a comment on YouTube, we'd love to hear from you. My thanks also to the Safety Labs team for another great show in the books. Bye for now. This podcast is created by Safety Products Global, the world's leading manufacturer of safety knives. Through our trusted brands, Klever, Slice, and PHC, we empower companies to prevent injuries by providing safer cutting tools for every material and application. Until next time, stay safe.
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