Safety and health at work belongs on Europe’s skills agenda

Across Europe, vocational education and training systems are being called on to respond to a world of work increasingly shaped by digitalisation, the green transition, demographic change and new forms of employment.

These changes reach beyond curricula and qualifications: they are felt in workplaces, where new tasks, technologies and work settings bring new and emerging risks that must be recognised, assessed and managed.

For EU-OSHA, this is where the skills debate meets occupational safety and health. Risk prevention should not be a separate message added once training is complete. It needs to be built into professional competence from the start.

Building safety at work from early on

Through OSHVET, EU-OSHA promotes safety and health at work among teachers and students in vocational education and training. Teachers and trainers help ensure that prevention is understood both as a regulatory requirement and as part of professional practice and workplace culture.

Learning does not stop at the classroom door. As people move between jobs, sectors and technologies, the occupational safety and health context can also change. Lifelong learning therefore has a prevention dimension: workers and employers need opportunities to keep their knowledge of work up to date, including how to carry it out safely and sustainably.

This is where OiRA, EU-OSHA's Online interactive Risk Assessment platform, brings practical support within easier reach of micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Developed by an active community of national and EU partners, its online tools reflect the realities of different sectors and guide MSEs step by step through a tailored risk assessment process.

Click here to discover the OiRA Tools

With more than 600,000 risk assessments started and over 350 tools available online, OiRA shows how structured guidance can help smaller workplaces move from awareness of risk to preventive action.

Together, OSHVET and OiRA show how occupational safety and health can be embedded in skills development, from vocational training to the everyday workplace decisions that support safer and healthier work.

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