Let me answer this question and ease your mind my brother / Sister chances of getting a job as a safety officer are very very high you’re even allowed to work 2 or more jobs as a Safety Officer you can work at your permanent job and make more than R30k a month then also be a safety consultant do site audits for construction companies charging them +- 20k you can also create safety files for companies charging them R2k per file that’s a total of R52k per month.
The problem is people do short causes then they call themselves Safety Officers which leads to people not getting jobs.
Now let me break it down.
There are 3 types of Safety Officers
1 Construction Safety Officers
2 Mining Safety Officers
3 General Safety Officers
How to become a safety officer?
If you want to be a safety officer firstly you must choose the industry where you want to be a safety officer at because safety courses are expensive.
If you want to be a Construction Safety Officers
You must have an NQF level 5 certificate. It can be (Samtrac, Shemtrac, SHEQman, OHS certificate just make sure it’s written NQF level 5.
After getting that NQF level 5 certificate you must register with SACPCMP and become a Candidate Construction Health and Safety Officer (registration costs +-R350) you will get a logbook then you must go to any construction site and Volunteer for 2 years to fill your log book as proof of service. After 2 years you must write a report of everything that you learnt on site and send it to SACPCMP after that you’ll pay +- 3500 and get a certificate that says you’re now a qualified Construction Health and Safety Officer. This certificate is like a licence you’ll have to pay +-3500 every year for the rest of your career.
After getting your licence you must do short courses like (Hira, incident investigation, legal liability, Coida, first aid, working at heights,basic Fire Fighting and train the trainer)
After doing all this you can go to Google Chrome and search indeed then search for “construction safety officer jobs” I did this and got a job offer in North West (Rustenburg) in less than 12 hours.
To be a Mine Safety Officer
You must do COMSOC 1 and 2 / samtrac for mining NQF level 5
After this you must do MQA she rep certificate then you must do Blasting Assistant certificate.
After that you must do Competent A certificate.
If you want to be a Mine Safety Officer underground you must volunteer to work underground for +- 200 shifts then apply for a blasting ticket at DMR costing +-R850.
You will get an MQA CERTIFICATE that serves as your licence as a Mine Safety Officer
After doing all this you can add short courses like( working in confined spaces, Coida, first aid, Hira 4 mining, legal liability for mining and toolbox talk)
When you’re don’t you go to Google and search Pnet then on pnet search for (Mining Safety Officer jobs)
To be a general safety officer
You need to do any OHS NQF level 5 certificate (Samtrac,Shemtrac, SHEQman etc) then do a A Diploma/Degree in Safety Management at (Unisa,but,nwu etc) the modules of your Diploma will consist of (business management, safety management, general management etc)
After that you must register with SAIOSH as a safety practitioner and pay +-1500 every year for your licence.
This diploma or degree qualifies you to work in industries where there is no Construction or mining involved.
Short courses to add are (risk management,First aid and end user Computing)