Introduction to Risk Assessment
Course Overview
At the end of this course, candidates will have an understanding of what a risk assessment is and how to complete one. To achieve this the course will define important terms, provide some basic background information to explain how important risk assessments are and discuss some of the legislation that applies. It will then go on to provide practical advice on how to identify hazards and analyse risk before finishing off by explaining the responsibilities of both employers and employees with regards to risk assessment.
Course Content
The course starts with the fundamentals: defining key terms like hazard and risk, and explaining why risk assessment matters as the foundation of workplace health and safety management, rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Risk assessment training online is grounded in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require every employer to carry out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment of the risks to employees and anyone else affected by their work. The course also covers how civil law plays a role: a poor or missing risk assessment can support a negligence claim if someone is injured as a result.
This risk assessment e-learning course is structured around the HSE's standard 5-step method, the framework used across UK workplaces:
1. Identify the hazards — walking through the workplace or task and spotting anything with the potential to cause harm
2. Decide who might be harmed and how — not just the person doing the task, but anyone nearby, visitors, or members of the public
3. Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions — this is where the likelihood vs severity matrix comes in
4. Record your findings — documenting hazards, who's at risk, and the control measures in place
5. Review the assessment and update it — as conditions, equipment or tasks change
A central part of learning how to do a risk assessment is weighing two factors against each other: how likely it is that harm will occur, and how severe that harm would be if it did. Plotting these on a simple risk matrix helps prioritise which hazards need action first, rather than treating every identified hazard as equally urgent.
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 don't require a perfect or exhaustive assessment. The legal standard is "suitable and sufficient": proportionate to the risk, and covering the significant hazards a competent person would reasonably be expected to identify, rather than every conceivable scenario.
The course covers practical risk assessment methods for recording and reviewing findings clearly, so that control measures are documented, understood by the people carrying out the work, and revisited when circumstances change.
Finally, the course explains the responsibilities of both employers and employees with regard to risk assessment: employers must ensure assessments are carried out and acted on, while employees have a duty to follow the control measures put in place and report new hazards they identify.
Every employer has a legal duty to ensure risk assessments are carried out for work activities. In practice this responsibility is usually carried out by a manager, supervisor, or a nominated competent person rather than every individual employee, though everyone benefits from understanding how the process works.
By the end of the course, you'll be able to:
- Define what a risk assessment is and why it matters
- Understand the legislation, regulation and civil law that applies
- Identify hazards and decide who might be harmed
- Evaluate risk using likelihood and severity
- Record and review risk assessment findings
- Understand employer and employee responsibilities
Course Duration
90 mins
Course Certification
Approved by IIRSM & CPD
