If you’re reading these words, it is likely that you are a management system auditor or a quality assurance professional. As such, you have exceptional depth of knowledge and experience working with the language of standards and schemes. But have you leveraged those skills in service of the broader industry, not to mention your own career advancement?
Standards developers want you
The lifeblood of standards is the feedback of users who audit (and are audited against) the clauses found therein. Without active practitioners who are willing to share their experiences and perhaps take further steps by volunteering for service on committees, new versions of standards will quickly lose touch with the needs of users and will fail to be adopted by the market.
Standards development is an international, consensus-building undertaking where an understanding of various regional and organizational cultural requirements is paramount. Therefore, those from countries and companies large and small, in a variety of industrial sectors, are needed to contribute to the process.
Considering food safety management system standards, for example, voices are wanted who audit farms, restaurants, suppliers, processing plants, warehouses, and more—every link in the chain that safely delivers food and beverages should have a say in how standards are written. Few people have a better sense for how current versions of standards work, and more importantly, how they fail to work.
In addition, standards development work is great way to meet colleagues and discover new career pathways. It is an investment of time and energy that pays for itself many times over.
Join the conversation at Exemplar Global’s Food Safety Expo
If you want to join the conversation about this topic and learn some important lessons about how you can get involved in standards development, please register for Exemplar Global’s Food Safety Expo.
This one-of-a-kind event, now in its third year, will include a special live panel discussion on March 9th. In this session, you will have the opportunity to hear from Carina Dalager, who is part of the executive team managing ISO/TC 34/SC 17, the technical committee responsible for development of the ISO 22000 family of food management system standards; and Stephanie Lemaitre, a GFSI benchmark leader providing expertise and training for food safety auditors, governance of certification programs, and certification operating models.
This special one-hour session is coming up soon, so take a moment to register today and find out how you can get involved in standards development for the betterment of industry and yourself.