This Code of Practice is designed to help companies assess and maintain the competence of their engineering staff particularly in safety critical areas and industries. It sets out the competencies expected and evidence required to prove competence in specific tasks and helps organisations create schemes for monitoring and measuring the competencies of its employees. Human error is still recognised as the most frequent cause of problems and the field of safety critical systems and functional safety continues to develop along with the complexity of systems.

• Part 1: Understanding Competence
• Section 1: Introduction
• Section 2: Competence and Criteria
• Part 2: Specifying and assessing criteria
• Section 3: Step 1: define competence activities and criteria
• Section 4: Step 2: specify activity competence
• Section 5: Step 3: assess personal competence
• Section 6: Step 4: compare personal and activity competence profiles
• Section 7: Applying the guidelines: a worked example
• Annex A Example Competence Assessment Form
• Annex B Example safety activities and IEC 61508
• Annex C Example safety activities summary
• Annex D Example safety competence criteria
• Annex E References
• Annex F Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Annex G History and Acknowledgements