Environmental health and safety directors oversee organizational compliance with local, state, and federal safety regulations and industry standards. They also ensure that environmental policy is available and updated at all times. They earn a cool average sum of $88,000 annually or $42 per hour.
Environmental health and safety directors inspect workplaces and minimize or eliminate hazards from processes. They are primarily tasked with protecting the employees, customers, and the environment. They identify potentially hazardous biological, chemical, and radiological materials in a bid to analyze them. Due to the nature of the job, they are fit physically and possess solid collaboration and leadership skills.
Environmental health and safety directors typically hold a bachelor's degree in occupational health, safety, or a related scientific field. However, some employers prefer to hire candidates with a master's degree in health physics, industrial hygiene, or a related subject. Since they work in various industries, on-the-job training is the way to learn the ropes and gain knowledge in the industries they find themselves in.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being an environmental health and safety director. For example, did you know that they make an average of $42.68 an hour? That's $88,776 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 5% and produce 1,400 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many environmental health and safety directors have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed creativity, problem-solving skills and communication skills.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be an environmental health and safety director, we found that a lot of resumes listed 10.5% of environmental health and safety directors included environmental health, while 7.8% of resumes included osha, and 7.6% of resumes included ehs. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the environmental health and safety director job title. But what industry to start with? Most environmental health and safety directors actually find jobs in the manufacturing and construction industries.
If you're interested in becoming an environmental health and safety director, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 41.2% of environmental health and safety directors have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 37.3% of environmental health and safety directors have master's degrees. Even though most environmental health and safety directors have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become an environmental health and safety director. When we researched the most common majors for an environmental health and safety director, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or master's degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on environmental health and safety director resumes include associate degree degrees or high school diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become an environmental health and safety director. In fact, many environmental health and safety director jobs require experience in a role such as environmental health safety manager. Meanwhile, many environmental health and safety directors also have previous career experience in roles such as safety manager or manager, environmental and safety.