A day in the life of Alex Wilson

Well I am a morning person so I rise fairly early, about 6:00am. The early bird gets the work, eh!  

   

Sometimes I am travelling so need to be up early to get to site or the airport. The red eye flight out of Manchester can be a bit of a killer, that’s a 3:45am alarm call then trip to the terminal. When I am not travelling I like to have some time to myself on a morning before the rest of the family get up and make the house a crazy zone before school.

I am an industrial hygienist (occupational hygienist) working in a corporate EHS department as part of the industrial hygiene (IH) team supporting Europe, Africa and the Middle East of a large chemical manufacturer.

I work for Huntsman which is a global chemical manufacturer specialising in differentiated chemicals. I am currently based at home but, as I support the operations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, I do travel overseas.  

I am still fairly new to the role actually so still finding my feet in terms of how the company operates its different divisions. However, I work as part of a strong IH team who support the five divisions of Huntsman. I am the direct liaison with its Performance Products Division and support seven sites across Europe. I also work with the rest of the team and EHS leads to support the IH function in others areas – such as REACH, training, and auditing.

Well I am a gadget man, I love my tech kit. Back in the day when I used to work on site more frequently I used to love my fancy noise meter. However, these days I guess it is my tablet/phone and the apps you can get to be a wannabe hygienist. Although these apps are not 100% accurate and cannot be used to carry out full assessments of the workplace, I think they have a real place to provide that initial qualitative assessment that can help you identify hazards. If I had the money and the time I would love to kit myself out with some state of the art gadgets.

I know you are supposed to say here things like my computer or my phone or my trusty journal. But I am going to say the people. Without people there would be no need to do what we do. I am passionate about people’s health. I am also a networker so I thrive on people, building contacts, connections and friendships in order to make me work better in what I do.

One area of my work where I feel very fortunate to be in is the work I do for our profession as a whole. I volunteer for the BOHS in a number of areas in order to give something back to the profession I am passionate about, as well as helping to secure a brighter future. Only today I was in a BOHS committee meeting in which I was working with my colleagues from across the UK. As well as getting on with some serious work, we were able to share a lot of laughs which just helps the day as a whole. It’s the people you work with whom you can share in good times, which also helps you enjoy your job.

I know this sounds geeky, but hey I am a scientist, I would say it’s when you are given a good challenge and you have to set about using your experience as well as researching new material in order to get an answer. I also love communicating with people – be it giving a presentation, running training courses or having a meeting.

Being an occupational hygienist is a very rewarding and challenging job. It combines science and engineering into a discipline of identifying, assessing, controlling and hopefully eliminating health hazards in the workplace. Just in these last few weeks the HSE released its latest statistics which shows more than ever that health needs to be high on the agenda in companies. Occupational Hygienists are a key cog in the overall mechanism of creating a change in culture and control in the workplace. Now that is rewarding in my eyes.