Safe Events Global and the BEAST ED programme

Introduction

In January 2021, Mark in here went on a call about an event in KSA called Soundstorm. He met the members of the Masterplanning team that day as well as some people from the client, MDLBEAST.

The team spoke about MDLBEAST’s plans to train and educate people in the Kingdom. A key part of the vision was to help build local expertise in events. The idea was that we, as the safety partner, would contribute to that training in Event Safety and Crowd Safety.

Recently, MDLBEAST launched the BEAST ED Career Path Programme. The Programme aims to upskill Saudi nationals and locals to work in the event industry. It’s putting structure to elements of training many of us have been doing over the years on MDLBEAST shows.

We recently delivered 2 weeks of Health & Safety-focused training in KSA as part of the Programme. Three of our team were there in person delivering. More were contributing online also.

Course contents

We put together 2 weeks of content to include as part of our delivery. We sought to strike a balance between externally-certified industry courses and in-house-developed content. Members of our team delivered the content, both in-person and remotely.

Elements included were as follows:

Introduction to Being Safe on an Event Site
General Introduction to Safety at Events
IOSH Working Safely at Events
First Aid / Basic Life Support
IOSH Managing Safely at Events
Introduction to Event Safety
Introduction to Crowd Safety
Introduction to Fire Safety Management for Events
Introduction to Key Technology for Event Safety
Working at Height Safety Awareness
Introduction to Plant Safety

Over the course of the 2 weeks we involved multiple guest speakers, both live and online.

Paul from our team delivered an online session on considerations around fire risk assessing. We used Soundstorm as a case study – given we were on the festival site at the time.

Lloyd Major from Halo Solutions also Zoomed in to deliver a thoroughly engaging session on technology for events. This was one of the final sessions for the group and it helped us end on a high.

Theory & Practice

Key for us is that we cover both core theory and that we introduce the learners to the practical side of things too.

To that end, Week 1 is done at our offices in Riyadh, while Week 2 is done at Banban, which is the site for Soundstorm.

We spend time (weather permitting) our on the site. Learners get to see up close some of what we do as Health & Safety specialists. They explored the site and saw ‘behind the scenes’, as it were.

We know from speaking with many of them that this was very effective in reinforcing the learning and theory.

We’re jealous

We envy those who attended the BEAST ED Career Path Programme.

Those looking to get into the event industry in KSA now have amazing opportunities like this Programme that MDLBEAST has put together.

The funding and ambition exists in KSA now to help the industry develop and thrive.

It’s really impressive to watch happening.

It’s very gratifying to be playing a small part in it also.

Thank yous

A LOT of credit needs to go to the team behind the BEAST ED Career Path Programme.

Over 600 people applied to come on the programme and whittling that number down to around 33 people to embark as the first group can’t have been easy.

Thank you to Grace Hardman, Melanie Lemnios and Johnny Wood in particular.

Bravo.

The results though.

The 14 people on the H&S stream were superb.

They were into it and interested in learning as much as they could.

That makes it an absolute pleasure to spend time with people and to help them learn.

We are already looking forward to the next one.

Mark Breen

Our Work

Wild Lights

Over 250,000 people each year attend this magical Chinese Lantern Festival in one of the world’s oldest operational zoos in Dublin, Ireland, across 55+ nights.