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You might be a student contemplating a career in industrial hygiene. Or you might be a new industrial hygienist trying to gain experience, or you might be established in the field and considering a new direction. Or you might be an employer looking to hire an industrial hygienist for the first time. Regardless, you might wish you had a resource laying out the skills one needs to be successful in industrial hygiene.

Fortunately, this resource exists in the form of AIHA’s Core Competencies for the Practice of Industrial/Occupational Hygiene, a document that describes the skills possessed by industrial hygienists, also known as occupational hygienists. An updated version of this document, facilitated by Barbara Dawson, CIH, CSP, FAIHA, was published this year. Since she completed her degree in 1980, Dawson has progressed from an early-career industrial hygienist to a seasoned professional to an emeritus professional. She’s worked as a corporate and consulting industrial hygienist, and she has helped recruit industrial hygienists for her employers. The rest of the Core Competencies update team included professionals at all stages of their careers, as well as industrial hygienists working in private industry, the military, and academia. The result of their efforts is a document that addresses industrial hygienists across the field.

“We had a really good cross-sectional team,” Dawson said. “I think that synergy with all those different perspectives represented really helped strengthen the document, so I'm hopeful that anyone in any of those areas or age groups will find it helpful.”

What’s the Purpose of the Core Competencies Document?

According to Dawson, the first version of the Core Competencies document was conceived to help students identify the skills required for an industrial hygiene career. “At the time when the document was originally developed,” she said, “there wasn't any good single comprehensive document that discussed what skills you needed to be successful as an industrial hygienist.” To meet this need, AIHA collaborated with the Academy of Industrial Hygiene, the American Board of Industrial Hygiene (now the Board for Global EHS Credentialing), and ACGIH in 2012. “The intent was to try to get all those hygiene organizations together and come up with what was probably the best approach to having success in a career as a hygienist,” Dawson continued.

Since then, the scope of the Core Competencies document has expanded. The 2025 Core Competencies document is “intended for a pretty diverse target audience,” Dawson said. She explained that although the document had originally been written for students, early-career industrial hygienists may also use it as a guide for professional development, and employers can use it to identify qualified candidates for industrial hygienist roles. “So students, early-career professionals, employers, but also, hopefully, all practicing industrial hygienists will find it helpful.”

“There's also a description of the levels of practice, from technician to practitioners to professionals, showing the progression to be truly professional,” Dawson added. Rather than being only accessible to students, industrial hygienists can use the document at any point in their careers.

Core Competencies also does not assume its readers will work in any specific work environment. “There are lots of opportunities as an industrial hygienist to practice,” Dawson said. “We try to show all the different places an industrial hygienist could work, whether it be in private industry or consulting or academia.”

What’s In the Core Competencies Document?

A person planning their industrial hygiene career path can use the Core Competencies document to identify skill areas where they may need more training. The document’s contents are divided into technical competencies—specialized, scientific skills such as air sampling, ergonomics, and noise and hearing loss prevention—and functional competencies—interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership and management, and strategic thinking.

The “functional skills” category was added when Dawson started leading the team tasked with updating the document in 2018. “I think when we hire somebody, we see they have a graduate degree in industrial hygiene, and we assume they have the technical competency,” Dawson explained. “But it's really important to also be able to communicate well and have good project management skills.” If an industrial hygienist doesn’t have good people skills, Dawson felt they would struggle to be successful at their job. “So much of industrial hygiene is interacting with all levels of an organization,” she continued. “It's talking to the wage roll people in a way they can understand. But it's also talking to the top company officials so that they understand what the issues are and will properly support any fixes to control exposures.”

The 2025 update includes two additional technical competencies, vibration and the Total Worker Health approach, as well as three new functional competencies, business literacy, confidentiality, and emotional intelligence. “We also included confidentiality this time because so much of what we do is with results of monitoring,” Dawson said. Although industrial hygienists haven’t historically focused on confidentiality, as data privacy laws are implemented, “it became more obvious that we needed to do a better job protecting the privacy of the individuals that we monitor,” she said.

While skills in business literacy make industrial hygienists more valuable to their employers, skills such as emotional intelligence help them work more effectively with others. “We also touch a little bit on allied professionals that industrial hygienists work with,” such as occupational health physicians and product stewards, Dawson said. “And there's a touch of hygiene in the practice of all those other fields as well, so relationship building is another important aspect of it.”

“A career in IH/OH is promising,” the Core Competencies document itself states. “As long as people work, there will be a need to protect their health.” With the Core Competencies document and other AIHA Professional Pathway resources, navigating this career is much easier.

The 2025 update to Core Competencies for the Practice of Industrial/Occupational Hygiene is available for free to AIHA members and for $19.95 to nonmembers from AIHA’s online marketplace.