They don’t exist yet- the person we will need in five years is not quite the person we are hiring today.
Think about the HSE officer hired at most terminals right now.
Strong on compliance. Fluent in audits, permits, toolbox talks and incident registers.
Someone who can walk a yard and tell you what is wrong before you have finished the sentence.
That person is not becoming irrelevant, far from it. But I find that the role is changing beneath them, and I am not sure we are thinking this through enough.
The HSE officer of 2030 will still need all of that ground-level instinct. What they will also need is something we are only starting to ask for:
• Reading data, while still reading the yard
• Working alongside AI, not around it or below it
• Spotting patterns across a thousand incidents, not just investigating the last one
• Turning a prediction into a conversation the operations team will actually act on
None of this replaces the role. If anything, it asks more of it. The instinct that took twenty years to build is invaluable. Now, with new tools alongside, it must be honed to answer new kinds of questions. Not only what happened, but what is likely to happen.
Right now, that is a gap all hiring teams are dealing with- but we shouldn’t be treating this as a hiring problem, something to solve in 2030, “when the right people show up”.
This is really a development challenge, and it starts now. The HSE officer of 2030, in many cases, might well already be on the team. We must ask ourselves- are we giving them the tools to upskill? The room to grow? Or just waiting for someone who does not yet exist to somehow appear in the future.
This challenge is part of how we were spurred to build Qavach the way we did. Not to replace the HSE professional, but to hand them the data, the patterns and the early warnings that *enable* them to lead, not just record.
Some of the strongest safety team members of the next decade will not be magically recruited- they are being grown, right now, on terminals like yours.
Are you enabling your team members to become the HSE officer of 2030?
