The purpose of this study is to anazlye accidents occurring in the Swedish construction industry focusing specifically on the situation in the individual trades. The article includes all occupational accidents with at least one day of absence from work that were reported to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency for the year of 2016. The results, focusing on accident cause, injured body parts, as well as accidents per weekday, month and age, show that although the trades share commonalities regarding occupational accidents a number of trade-specific problem areas stand out. With this in mind, conclusions are drawn regarding the situation in each respective trade and suggestions are made for future studies focusing on accidents in construction industry trades.

BACKGROUND

The paper is a research review focusing on occupational safety in the construction industry.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose is to present research that highlights the areas of occupational safety and risks and to identify areas where research is lacking.

METHODS

326 articles from scientific journals, mainly covering the construction industry in Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and Japan have been studied. The findings are presented under 11 categories: accident statistics; individual factors; legislation and regulations; ethical considerations; risk management; leadership, management, organization; competence; safety design; cost-benefit calculations; programs and models; and technical solutions.

RESULTS

The research is dominated by initiatives from researchers and government authorities, while the construction industry only appears as the object for the research. There is a scarcity of research on integrated systems encompassing subcontractors, as well as a lack of research with sociological perspectives on accidents. Furthermore, only a few studies have applied a gender perspective on safety in construction, i.e. there is a need of further research in this particular area.

CONCLUSIONS

A range of initiatives have been taken to increase safety in the construction industry and the initiatives are mainly reported to be successful. There are some cultural differences, but basically researchers present similar results regardless of country.

In this paper I like to discuss the method and concept of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), which in Sweden has been named validering, (validation). This has now become a well established concept and model for especially authorities to discuss and in practice visualise and assess the knowledge and competence among unemployed citizens, with the aim to enhance the chances for employment. In short, RPL is both a way to visualise but also to assess and formulate former knowledge and competence that a person has gained, most often at their time at a workplace. Many times this experience is not explicitly formulated, nor documented, which in a situation of organisational downsizing or other types of changes can mean that a person has problems in clearly making the knowledge and skill knowledgeable to a future employer. It is in this challenging situation for the individual that RPL can be of great importance. In focus in this paper is with the results made from an EU funded work as ground discuss the possibilities and difficulties in making RPL a well used tool in Swedish working life.

Purpose – Work-place learning takes place in many settings and in different ways, resulting in knowledge and skills of different kinds. The recognition process in the work place is however often implicit and seldom discussed in terms of recognition of prior learning (RPL). The aim of this paper is to give examples of how the knowledge/skills of employees get recognition in the workplace and to discuss what the consequences of such recognition processes might be. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a study in two companies and two municipalities, where 21 interviews were conducted with human resource managers, team leaders and union representatives. The research questions concerned the ways skills were recognised among employees and how the logics of these actions could be understood. Findings – The findings show that both companies and municipalities have their own ways of assessing knowledge/skills, mostly out of a production logic of what is needed at the workplace. However, certain skills are also made “unvisualised” for the employee. This employer-controlled recognition logic is important to understand when RPL models are brought to the work place in order to obtain win-win situations for both employers and employees. Practical implications – It seems important to identify an already existing system for assessment of knowledge/skills at the workplace when bringing RPL processes to the workplace. Originality/value – The approach to understand assessment processes in these companies and municipalities from an RPL perspective has not been widely covered before.