My name is Steve Wallace. I'm currently working in the field of Safety. I'm currently the Safety Director for the Heavy Construction Safety Association of Saskatchewan.

In that association, the Safety Director is also the Executive Director so it not only entails doing the actual field work (like our fellow that we have up in Saskatoon does) but it also entails running the office and taking care of business, so to speak - as well as making sure that payroll's met and bills are paid and that sort of thing.


[Decision To Enter This Particular Occupation:]

Many of the things that I've done have actually led to the point where I'm at. So if I start, I probably wouldn't even start with a job first.

In high school I was an athletic trainer. Because I work currently in Safety, some people say, "What's that got to do with Safety?" Well, that's a field of sports medicine or emergency response, which is part of the Safety field. So that's really, I guess, where I first got started.

I attended (at the time it was called) the Saskatchewan Technical Institute. I took Electronics, Engineering Technology (flunked calculus). So I went and worked for a year. I was a Surveyor for a while and I worked in an Automotive Manufacturing Plant and decided I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. I wanted to use my head more than my hands and my back. So I returned back to school.

I took this course called Radiation Protection Technology in Occupational Health and Safety. It was a year-long course, again at STI, and when you graduated it was designed to get people to go up north to work in the Uranium Mining Industry - there provide again a very specialised safety service.

When I took the course I didn't think of it as safety, but a very specialised form of safety in which case we went underground. We designed ventilation systems and measured their effectiveness and measured people's exposures to such things as radiation levels, dust, diesel, any airborne particulates or contaminants. So that's where I got started.

Conscious - no. Twenty years ago I didn’t think that I'm gonna take this really circuitous route to get to be the head of some safety association. That wasn't in my mind. So in some ways you know, it was happen-stance, sort of just occurred.

But on the other hand when I look back on it, there were a lot of choices that were made that did lead you to this point. I tended to always do things that I thought were interesting and, you know, always worked to try to do things to the best of your ability. So, one case I can't really say that I planned to be at this point at this stage in my career, but on the other hand, I think it was just through the choices that were made that did lead me here. So I think it's a little of both; a little bit of fate and a little bit of choices that you make along the way. But it was no grand plan to "I'll do this, this and this, and this is what's gonna happen."

[Change & Adaptability:]

I learned very early on that no matter how hard you worked or whatever you did, there would always be things that were, let's say, be beyond your control. And that all of a sudden you may have had this great plan for this career and I mean...

When I first moved up to Eldorado I had planned that I would be there two years, I'd save a bunch of money, I'd come out, my wife and I would buy a house and we'd move to Saskatoon or whatever. After that we'd spent about six months up there - we were actually planning on being lifers. We were gonna stay up north our whole career. You know, try and save enough money so by the time we're fifty we'd retire and that was it. Then things changed along the way.

So our philosophy (or my philosophy) of careers is probably a little bit different than another person in that I believe that there is no such thing as job security. The only security we truly have is in our ability to get another job. So if you're talking career path, my whole career has been in "safety". A lot of it has been geared towards emergency response or training of people. So when I look at a career, I could leave this job and do something different again and there would still be elements that are similar. Like now that I'm in more of a management position it would be possible to leave the Safety field and go someplace as a Management. So some people would say that's a different career and some people would just say it's an evolution of a career. I have a hard time, you know, actually determining what a career is. I actually tend, probably, to view that a career is just a string of, you know, jobs that have some thread that connect them together.

[Advancement In This Particular Occupation:]

I guess what I look for in a job is hopefully a challenge, something that's interesting and something that I'm gonna like to do. Most people are gonna work their whole life long, you know, for the most part. Now, there may be some form of retirement at some point, but I view that I'll probably work my whole life long. So I hopefully want to be involved in something that is of interest to me, that I hope I feel is of some value to somebody and, you know, that provides me with some challenges. What you have to do then is you sit down and you evaluate. Like, are you happy where you are? do you have enough challenges? are you happy with the monetary awards?

My philosophy's always been, so what if you made a mistake? Well, you know, I was looking for a job when this one came along, so it's not a big deal to go and take a look for another job.

Inherently, most people are not great at changing. I mean, that's the human nature. We like to stay fairly in place or state, if you will. I think it's important that we have the ability to adapt and change and technology has come a long ways. And now, you know, we're running around with things like little laptop computers and cell phones which twenty years ago, there really wasn't a laptop computer.

[Skills Needed:]

I'd like to think of myself as personable and as having some people skills and that if I have a goal or set a target that I'm persistent enough to kind of keep at it until I get there. Or, conversely, if it doesn't appear to be working I analyze - is the target worthwhile going at or should we shift directions? So there's nothing wrong with being persistent, keeping at something. But sometimes you have to take a step back and take a look. Is the target still worth achieving? Or is it going to do what we want? And if it isn't, well then maybe we should re-shift our focus. So I think that sort of paradoxical persistence but also being prepared to look at what is our goal (our target) that we're trying to achieve. I think, if you want to call it a goal or being focused, that's a big part too.

[Attitude & Positive Behaviour:]

A positive attitude isn’t going to get you up a mountain if you don't know where the hell the mountain is. However, again kind of getting back to that last thing, is if you are clear in your goals and you're focused, a positive attitude can help you make your way through there. Because a lot of time if you're going to be achieving or trying to strive for a goal, you're going to find there's going to be setbacks. You're going to have rejections. There are going to be people who are going to be negative against what you're trying to do and all that. So a positive attitude can help give you a little bit of buoyancy to go against that.

A lot of what I do is people-oriented so people skills are very, very important and experience is important.

[Training & Education:]

I don't want to say that training isn't important but I think once you get to a certain point in your career; it's sort of like when you look at a person's resume when they first start out. I mean, all their education and all that stuff is right there but after you've been working in a field for a number of years, pretty soon who really cares what high school you went to?

If you're starting out, people skills will help and any experience you can get will help, but obviously the base then is founded upon probably a little heavier on training. So, at my stage, I would probably say the people skills and experience are probably more important. But I don't want to downplay the training because that allowed me a base to get me where I am today.

[Advice For Someone Entering This Field Of Work:]

If they were interested in my particular career in Safety, probably for most people now the best way is through some form of education - whether they've worked for a number of years in a given trade and then taken night courses or something like that. Or they go to some place like Ryerson in Toronto or BCIT and they take a two- or four-year course in Occupational Health and Safety. I don't think one way or the other is better. A lot of it is going to depend on that individual.