Why safety leaders say organizations should study what goes right
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Three certified safety leaders explain why studying success matters as much as investigating what goes wrong
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The Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals (BCRSP) acts in the public interest by certifying occupational health and safety professionals across Canada. As a federally incorporated not-for-profit organization, BCRSP establishes and maintains rigorous standards for education, experience, examination, and professional conduct for holders of the CRSP® and CRST® designations. These certification programs are accredited to the internationally recognized ISO/IEC 17024 standard, providing employers, regulators, and the public with confidence in the qualifications and professionalism of certified practitioners.
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“Certification, whether we’re talking about the CRSP or the CRST, is a disciplined approach that requires that an individual measure, assess, and be mindful of all the different parts of an organization”
Larry Masotti,
BCRSP
Published Sep 23, 2026
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“You’ve got an external party assessing your staff member’s ability to really use best practices and use evidence-based approaches to do the problem solving”
Rebecca Chow,
BCRSP
pay attention, and sometimes it’s too easy to assign a number to something. It becomes a blanket statement. So, I think we have to balance qualitative with quantitative.”
Left unchecked, Masotti says that imbalance breeds a different kind of risk: complacency. “Achieving success or getting good at something is always exciting and rewarding. Monitoring that success can be difficult because it requires diligence and discipline.” Organizations that track near-miss reporting as a leading indicator of safety performance alongside traditional incident data are, in effect, building that discipline into their systems rather than leaving it to chance.
Masotti connects that discipline directly to certification standards. “Certification, whether we’re talking about the CRSP or the CRST, is a disciplined approach that requires that an individual measure, assess, and be mindful of all the different parts of an organization,” he says, pointing to the CRSP and CRST’s alignment with ISO 17024 and ISO 9001 as the structure behind that rigour, which also obligates certificants to keep developing year after year. He ties that discipline to a broader shift in what safety work is being asked to measure, one that runs alongside the rise of artificial intelligence in the field.
“We’re talking much more about some of the human-centric skills like mental health and emotional maturity,” he says. “Those things can be difficult to measure.”
Building the psychological safety to learn from what goes well For Rebecca Chow, BSc, CDMP-E, CRSP, and vice-chair of the BCRSP, the practical starting point is a shift from feedback to feed-forward.
“The foundation is really a foundation of not necessarily focusing on feedback but focusing on feed-forward, because you’re really trying to find out what can go differently to make it a different situation in the future,” Chow says. That requires an environment where workers feel safe raising a
near miss long before it becomes an incident: “It’s really necessary for people to feel comfortable to admit a mistake they may have made, for the individuals to come forward noting a near miss.”
Chow points to the after-action review as the practical tool she has seen work best, built on a multidisciplinary team examining “the work as done versus the work as documented or imagined.” That kind of review functions only, she says, when people can “influence good communication in that psychologically safe environment.”
She also connects the behavioural side of certification directly to this culture. “The certification process looks at certificant competencies, and the certificants are required to demonstrate not only technical competency but also behavioural competency,” she says, naming influence and communication as the two competencies she has seen do the most to move teams from reactive response to proactive prevention. On Chow’s own team, roughly 80 percent of staff currently hold the Canadian Registered Safety Professional (CRSP) designation, a figure she raises when employers question whether certification is worth pursuing.
“You’ve got an external party assessing your staff member’s ability to really use best practices and use evidence-based approaches to do the problem solving,” she says, noting the CRSP exam includes case study questions, not just technical recall. “The certification allows you to have confidence in their approach and the knowledge they have.”
Certification as the discipline behind measuring success Jeremy Mollet, M.Eng., MBA, CRSP, CSP, CMIOSH, CHMM, director of resilience and corporate services at Enmax Corporation in Calgary, and a member of the BCRSP’s Board of Governors, says competence is built over time and cannot be reduced to a single credential.
“It’s not just a certificate. It’s not just a designation. It’s not just going to university and getting a degree,” Mollet says. “Those are all good things, absolutely, and they make up competence,
but the other part is the application of it, and being able to rely on all of that experience, and failures as well as successes, to make informed decisions.”
Mollet illustrates the gap between compliance and competence with an example from earlier in his own career. “When I was younger, I took the courses, so I can go and deliver a task-hazard analysis or a field-level hazard analysis. I think I have the theory, and I think I have the form and function. I’m able to say yes, from a compliance perspective, I can check the box,” he says. “The difficulty is I don’t have the experience, and I don’t have the operational knowledge. I need to rely on those people to make sure that it’s validated.” Recognizing the limits of one’s own expertise, he says, is itself a mark of maturity: “I don’t have that skill or experience. I don’t have competence in this area.”
His advice to safety professionals, junior or senior, is to treat certification as a starting point rather than a finish line. “Getting your credentialling is great, and that’s one step,” he says. “It opens up some doors. It does give you a bit of professional recognition and credibility, but it’s never done.”
He encourages safety professionals pursuing CRSP certification to keep leaning on the wider network of practitioners around them. “Reaching out to other people has been one of the biggest strengths of my career,” he says, describing conversations built around a simple question: “Tell me what you do, and is there any way that I can participate?”
That kind of candour, Mollet says, depends on the same psychological safety Chow describes. “Being psychologically safe doesn’t mean that everything is happy and that everything is positive,” he says. “It means you’re able to critically say, this is a challenge for me, or this is a challenge for the team.” Competence, once earned, still has to be maintained, he adds: “It’s never done. You need to
continuously maintain and explore and be curious, so that you can continuously improve.”
50 years of certifying the people who notice what’s working Taken together, the three perspectives point to the same conclusion from different directions: organizational, cultural, and individual. As demand for certified OHS professionals continues to grow across Canadian industry, the BCRSP’s leaders argue that studying what goes right, and certifying the people equipped to notice it, is no less important than investigating what goes wrong.
That argument is built into the certification itself. The eligibility and examination requirements behind the CRSP designation test not just technical knowledge of hazards and controls but also the judgement to apply that knowledge in the field – the same distinction Mollet draws between checking a compliance box and validating that a control actually works. Because a single exam cannot certify a career’s worth of judgement, the BCRSP also requires every certificant to maintain their standing through the mandatory Continuous Professional Development Program, a five-year cycle Masotti says gives certification its lasting discipline.
Fifty years after the BCRSP began certifying safety practitioners, its leaders say that discipline is what lets organizations tell the difference between being safe and simply being lucky.
This article was produced in collaboration with the Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals.
Source: BCRSP, “2025 Salary Survey Data,” February 10, 2026 (bcrsp.ca/en/news-events/news/2025-salary-survey-data)
* For comparison, the general OHS median salary (Employment and Social Development Canada’s Job Bank) sits at $85,000.
The strongest fit: BCRSP’s 2025 Salary Survey
100
80
60
40
20
0
Base: 6,237 CRSP/CRST certificants invited; 1,819 responded (1,634 CRSP, 172 CRST, 13 both)
69%
89%
86%
of CRSP/CRST respondents report salaries above $100,000, up from 59% in 2023 and 50% in 2017*
are satisfied or more than satisfied with their OHS career
have 10+ years of OHS experience
Source: bcrsp.ca/en/news-events/news/perceived-value-certification-survey-0
90%
of employers “extremely” or “very likely” to recommend earning a CRSP/CRST
54%
of employers formally acknowledge staff who earn a BCRSP certification
Employer-side data, from BCRSP’s 2023 Perceived Value of Certification Survey
As the Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals (BCRSP) marks 50 years of certifying occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals in Canada in 2026, three of its senior leaders say organizations still spend too much time investigating what goes wrong and not enough time studying what goes right. Larry Masotti, Jeremy Mollet, and Rebecca Chow, all current members of the BCRSP’s Board of Governors, spoke separately about why success deserves the same scrutiny as failure and what role certification plays in helping organizations replicate it.
Moving beyond a reactive approach to safety Larry Masotti, MA, BEd, CRSP, and chair of the board of governors at the BCRSP, says an incident-only focus tends to leave organizations reactive rather than proactive.
“There’s certainly value in both of those approaches, but if we only react, we’re not anticipating what’s coming and we’re not dealing with leading indicators,” Masotti says. He also points to a tendency to over-rely on numbers: “If it’s numerical, we