When we last reviewed the Health and Safety Competency Framework in 2019, it was before COVID, before the rapid emergence of AI, and before many of the changes we are now seeing in how and where organisations operate. Businesses are growing quickly and moving into new markets whilst operating across increasingly complex global supply chains and responding to changing legislative, societal and reporting expectations.
At the same time, our understanding of what it means to keep people safe and well is broadening. The profession is increasingly expected to consider not only physical health and safety, but psychological health and safety and the wider factors that influence wellbeing at work. Along with this, organisations are asking more of every function: how are you enabling the business to perform? This question is as relevant for Health and Safety as any other function. Health and Safety has risked being perceived as primarily a compliance activity - something organisations have to do, rather than something that enables them to do great work.
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The opportunity for the profession is to change that. This doesn't mean technical expertise matters less. It remains fundamental. But technical knowledge alone isn't enough to create impact. Today's Health and Safety professional needs to understand the organisation they operate within: its ambitions, pressures, people, performance measures and priorities. They need to understand how work affects people physically and psychologically, and be able to apply their expertise pragmatically, influence decisions, enable others and help the organisation consciously manage risk as it grows and changes. Put simply, our role is not just to make work safe. It is to help organisations do great work safely.
And that requires us to keep evolving too. The purpose of revisiting the framework in 2026 was therefore not simply to update a set of competencies. It was to challenge ourselves again as a profession: what does it take to be truly effective and make an impact in Health and Safety today - and what will we need for the future? Our mission hasn't changed. We want people to go home safe and well. But as the world around us changes, we cannot become complacent about the capabilities required to achieve it.
This framework has always been shaped by the profession, for the profession. The first iteration was developed in 2015, followed by a significant review in 2019. In 2026, we returned to the profession to test what still stood up, what needed to evolve and what might be missing. We deliberately sought input from a broad range of Health and Safety professionals, drawing on the Acre network, previous contributors, professional networks, forums and social media to extend participation beyond those already close to the framework.
These participants made up an active working group which had a global footprint. The working group was invited to review the existing framework and contribute through a survey and/or structured interview. We asked four deliberately simple questions: What's missing? What do you disagree with or believe is over-emphasised? Which three competencies matter most for Health and Safety professionals in 2026, and why? What should the framework encourage more of over the coming years? The structured interviews allowed us to probe those answers more deeply, before drawing together the recurring themes and using them to challenge and reshape the framework.
Throughout the process, we maintained one important lens: this is a non-technical competency framework. When themes such as AI and emerging technology arose, for example, we considered the underlying capability a professional needs to navigate them - curiosity, continuous learning, judgement and the ability to critically evaluate what is useful and appropriate - rather than creating competencies around individual technologies that may quickly change. What was perhaps most striking was how much of the previous framework stood the test of time.
This wasn't a case for starting again. Instead, the research highlighted where emphasis needed to shift and where some capabilities needed to become much more explicit. A revised framework was then shared with the working group for further validation, with the final round of feedback incorporated into the 2026 edition. The result is a deliberately simple structure: three Foundations that apply throughout a career, followed by Business Partnering and Leadership levels.
