Bowtie Risk Assessment for Occupational Safety Training Course

Course overview

Occupational safety teams often hold hazard registers, incident data, risk matrices and procedural controls, yet still struggle to show how major accident scenarios are prevented, how control failures could escalate, and who verifies that critical barriers work. Bowtie risk assessment turns a high-consequence event—such as a fall from height, loss of containment, vehicle-pedestrian collision or confined-space exposure—into a visible model linking threats, preventive barriers, recovery measures, escalation factors and assurance activities. This course enables practitioners to build risk arguments that supervisors, engineers, contractors and senior leaders can review and act on.

Participants learn a structured bowtie method aligned with ISO 31000 risk-management principles and ISO 45001 occupational health and safety management systems. They define top events and consequences, distinguish hazards from threats, test barrier effectiveness, identify degradation factors, assign barrier owners, and develop performance standards for critical controls. The course also covers workshop facilitation, evidence requirements, control verification, bowtie-to-risk-register integration and using incident findings to strengthen existing models rather than merely update paperwork.

Teaching combines instructor-led method demonstrations with facilitated modelling sessions, peer review and realistic occupational safety cases. Participants work through a selected high-risk scenario and produce a documented bowtie model, barrier register, escalation-factor analysis, assurance plan and practical implementation roadmap. The completed pack can be adapted for use in site risk reviews, contractor briefings, critical-control verification programmes and management reporting.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Construct a bowtie diagram that links a defined hazard, top event, threats, barriers and consequences
• Differentiate preventive barriers, recovery barriers, safeguards and administrative controls within occupational safety scenarios
• Identify escalation factors and specify degradation controls for critical safety barriers
• Develop barrier performance standards using functionality, availability, reliability and survivability criteria
• Assign barrier owners, verification activities and evidence sources in a critical-control assurance register
• Facilitate a structured bowtie workshop with operations, maintenance, engineering and contractor stakeholders
• Integrate bowtie outputs with a risk register, incident investigation findings and ISO 45001 control processes
• Produce an implementation plan for applying bowtie-based critical-control management at a workplace

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Health and Safety Managers — who need a defensible method for managing major occupational safety risks
• HSE Advisors and Officers — who develop risk assessments and verify whether controls remain effective
• Operational Managers and Supervisors — who own frontline controls for high-risk work activities
• Process Safety and Risk Specialists — who need to connect bowtie analysis with enterprise risk and assurance systems
• Engineering and Maintenance Managers — who maintain physical barriers and need clear control-performance requirements
• Contractor Safety Managers — who must communicate critical controls across multi-employer worksites

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical familiarity with workplace risk assessment, including hazards, consequences, likelihood, controls and risk matrices. Experience in HSE operations, supervision, engineering, maintenance, permit-to-work, incident investigation or contractor management is useful because course cases require operational judgement about how controls function. Participants should be able to read site procedures and contribute to group discussions of real work activities. No prior bowtie-modelling experience, specialist mathematical knowledge, programming capability or formal process-safety qualification is required. A laptop is helpful for digital modelling exercises but is not mandatory for classroom delivery.

Training methodology

The instructor introduces each bowtie component through worked occupational safety examples before participants apply it in small modelling teams. Exercises use scenarios such as work at height, mobile plant interaction, confined spaces and hazardous-energy isolation to test top-event definitions, threat pathways and barrier quality. Participants critique sample bowties, examine incident evidence, build a barrier register and practise facilitation prompts for operational workshops. On the final day, each participant completes an application plan identifying a priority scenario, stakeholders, evidence sources, review cycle and first assurance actions.

Course outline

Day 1: Bowtie foundations for occupational safety risk

• Bowtie method purpose and relationship to occupational safety risk assessment
• Hazards, top events and consequences in high-risk work scenarios
• Threat pathways and loss-of-control mechanisms
• Preventive versus recovery barriers
• Barrier types: physical, engineered, procedural and competency-based
• Risk matrices, ALARP reasoning and bowtie model boundaries
• ISO 31000 and ISO 45001 links to bowtie analysis

Workshop: Participants convert a conventional risk-assessment entry for a vehicle-pedestrian collision into a first-pass bowtie diagram.

Day 2: Building robust bowtie models

• Defining a precise and observable top event
• Selecting credible threats without duplicating causes
• Writing consequence statements at the correct level of severity
• Identifying existing barriers and testing independence
• Distinguishing barriers from activities, documents and outcomes
• Mapping preventive and mitigative pathways
• Using BowTieXP model structure and notation

Workshop: Teams build a detailed bowtie model for a confined-space entry scenario and present their threat-to-consequence logic for peer challenge.

Day 3: Barrier degradation and critical-control design

• Escalation factors that weaken or defeat barriers
• Escalation-factor controls and their placement in a bowtie
• Critical-control selection criteria
• Barrier effectiveness and quality testing
• Performance standards for physical and procedural barriers
• Functionality, availability, reliability and survivability measures
• Barrier ownership and accountability mapping

Workshop: Participants complete an escalation-factor and performance-standard worksheet for isolation controls during maintenance work.

Day 4: Assurance, verification and operational use

• Critical-control assurance versus routine compliance checking
• Verification questions and evidence requirements
• Barrier registers and control-health dashboards
• Leading indicators for barrier performance
• Connecting audits, inspections and maintenance records to barriers
• Using incident investigations to update bowtie models
• Integrating bowties with risk registers and ISO 45001 processes

Workshop: Participants design a barrier assurance plan, including verification frequency, evidence sources, owners and escalation actions, for a selected bowtie.

Day 5: Facilitation and workplace implementation

• Planning a cross-functional bowtie workshop
• Stakeholder roles for operations, engineering, maintenance and contractors
• Facilitation questions that expose weak control assumptions
• Managing disagreement over threat credibility and barrier effectiveness
• Reviewing and quality-assuring completed bowtie models
• Communicating critical controls through briefings and field tools
• Implementation roadmaps, governance and model review cycles

Workshop: Each participant presents a workplace bowtie implementation plan and receives instructor and peer feedback on scope, governance and assurance priorities.

Tools & standards covered

BowTieXP, BowTie Server, ISO 45001:2018, ISO 31000:2018

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions