AGS Chair’s blog November 2025: safety data and skills pipeline for ground engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on AGS (UK) – Blog/Magazine
30 Second Briefing
AGS Magazine’s November 2025 issue focuses on analytical challenges in interpreting historical soil data, material management plans, and a rise in environmental disputes affecting geotechnical and geoenvironmental projects. The edition publishes the 2024 Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Industry Accident Statistics, giving sector-wide safety performance data to benchmark site practices and risk controls. Early-career initiatives feature strongly, with an AGS Early Careers Poster Competition on “Top Five Industry Insights” and promotion of the Ground Forum Undergraduate Mentoring Programme for structured mentoring of future ground engineers.
Technical Brief
- 2024 Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Industry Accident Statistics provide a sector-wide baseline for site safety benchmarking.
- Accident dataset enables firms to compare incident frequency and severity against national industry performance.
- Statistics support targeted review of method statements, exclusion zones and lifting operations on higher-risk projects.
- Trend analysis from the 2024 figures can feed directly into CDM risk registers and design reviews.
- Accident data are particularly relevant for geoenvironmental works where contaminated ground and gases add compound hazards.
- Early-career materials encourage embedding safe excavation, logging and sampling behaviours from undergraduate level onwards.
- Ground Forum Undergraduate Mentoring Programme offers structured transfer of CDM, temporary works and RAMS good practice.
- Industry-wide publication of accident statistics promotes more consistent reporting definitions and near-miss capture across companies.
Our Take
Within the only a handful of Geotechnical stories in our coverage, AGS-led initiatives like the 2024 accident statistics work are one of the few that explicitly frame safety as an industry-wide data exercise rather than a project-by-project issue, which tends to give their guidance disproportionate influence on smaller consultancies and contractors.
The focus on early-career activities such as the AGS Early Careers Poster Competition and the Ground Forum Undergraduate Mentoring Programme aligns with several other Safety-tagged pieces where skills shortages and competency gaps are flagged as latent risk factors, suggesting AGS is targeting the ‘people’ side of risk rather than just technical standards.
With 30 tag-matched Safety/Projects items in our database but relatively few that combine structured competitions (like the 2025 photography competition) with formal statistics, AGS appears to be using softer engagement tools to keep safety culture visible between major incident or standards updates.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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