Safety’s Hidden Front Door: Jacqueline Handy on the Career Nobody Knows Exists

When Jacqueline Handy brings safety professionals to speak at career days in New York City, students tell her they have never heard of safety as a career. She understands the reaction, because she walked into the field the same way, without knowing it was there.

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Jacqueline Handy, Environment, Health and Safety Manager at Haugland Group and president of the ASSP Hudson River Valley Chapter, to talk about how people find their way into safety and what it takes to keep new workers safe once they arrive.

Jacqueline started out as a mom finishing her degree. After completing an MBA at Wagner College, she went looking for a marketing role and was hired by a site safety company in New York City, with no idea what site safety was. At her first board meeting, the safety professionals came in from the field in work boots, jeans and polos, and she held the usual construction-worker stereotype until they started talking about projects, safety plans and systems she had never heard of. “I said, okay, this is where I want to be,” she says. While producing their contracts, she also saw what they earned and realized she was in the wrong field. From there she moved into New York City transit, working her way from office engineer to construction superintendent, with safety and environmental performance part of every role. She then spent almost three years with the Board of Certified Safety Professionals, speaking to safety professionals across the country. She now holds her CSP and CHST, a second master’s in occupational health and industrial hygiene, and is working on her PhD.

This conversation breaks down:

– How a marketing job at a site safety firm, and one meeting with its field team, pulled her into the profession
– What years in New York City transit taught her, from an overnight concrete pour at Grand Central to working in the subway
– Why she trains new hires in a room lined with photos of the company’s own job sites, and what happens when they spot the one they’ll be working on
– Repetition, humour and hands-on practice, including the confined space session where trainees set up the tripod and winch and pull her up
– The flagger who vented at her on a rail project, and how offering respect first turned into a working partnership
– Why she recommends the CHST for people in construction, and why it matters that it doesn’t require a college degree
– Imposter syndrome, women in construction, and what she tells tradeswomen when she meets them on site

Her goal now is to make sure people hear about safety as a career option, because in her experience, once they do, they want in. Safety professionals work at Disney World, at Tiffany & Co., in food, rail and construction, and in her words, “Everybody needs one.” She volunteers with Nontraditional Employment for Women in New York City, collecting donated boots, tools and PPE for its students and bringing safety professionals to their career days. “People don’t know what they don’t know, and we’re here to deliver that knowledge,” she says.

On site, she leads with respect. Every safety professional has the authority to stop work, and she is clear that she would rather never get to that point. “You have to give the respect that you want. Give it first,” she says. With a worker, she asks about the trade before offering anything, because she doesn’t know how to weld and doesn’t pretend to. She describes herself as “a jack of all trades and a master of safety,” and treats the crew as co-workers on the same project, with the same interest in delivering it on time and under budget.

You will also hear about “safety mom,” the Jacqueline who checks fire extinguishers on vacation and handed out electrolytes and sunscreen at one of her daughter’s modelling shoots, and why she thinks that kind of care comes naturally to safety professionals. She talks about the mentors who shaped her, including a transit leader she asked directly to mentor her, and a mid-career pairing through ASSP’s Women in Safety Excellence group. She also shares the one thing she would tell herself at the start, as a single mom who assumed she couldn’t afford to get involved.

If you are early in your safety career, thinking about moving into safety from another field, or responsible for training new workers, this episode is worth your time.

Jacqueline is Environment, Health and Safety Manager at Haugland Group, where every new employee goes through her onboarding. You can find her on LinkedIn.