By Laura Jensen, Director of Operations, VirtuOHS
Hi! I'm Laura. Operations Director here with VirtuOHS, and I've got a possibly touchy one for you today.
I've never understood professionals who plagiarize the work of other professionals.
And I don't mean learning from someone's work, researching how others approach a problem, using accepted industry standards as a foundation, or properly using templates and resources available to you. That's what competent professionals do.
I mean copying it. Taking someone else's work, repackaging it, and presenting it to a client as something you've created for them.
Because here's the thing:
When you have to steal another professional's work to demonstrate your own competence, you demonstrate the opposite.
And in occupational health and safety, that's not just an integrity problem; it's a safety problem.
A company hiring you to develop a health and safety program isn't paying for a binder. They're paying for your professional knowledge, judgement, and ability to understand their operation well enough to build something that protects those working inside it.
Their workers.
Their equipment.
Their hazards.
Their processes.
Their regulatory requirements.
Their responsibilities.
You can repackage someone else's work and present it as something new. But presentation doesn't change where the expertise came from, and a different logo doesn't make it their safety program.
And it certainly doesn't make it your work.
What Did the Client Actually Pay For?
There are two problems here.
First, you are not giving the company that hired you the professional service they paid for.
If they hired you because they believed you had the knowledge and ability to develop their program, handing them somebody else's work is not efficiency. It's not using a template. And it's not working smarter.
...It's substituting someone else's competence for your own.
Second—and considerably more concerning—you may be giving that company false confidence in a program that was never built for them in the first place.
That's where this stops being an argument about professional pride and takes a side step into the oh-shit.
A safety program is supposed to reflect the operation it governs. If the hazards, responsibilities, procedures, equipment, reporting structures, emergency arrangements, training requirements, or applicable legislation don't reflect the actual workplace, what exactly does that binder protect?
Because people will rely on it.
Management may believe requirements have been addressed.
Supervisors may believe they have a functioning process to follow.
Workers might even reasonably believe the procedures they've been given were developed around the work they're actually being asked to do.
And the company that paid for the binder may operate under the belief that a qualified professional has done the necessary work to ensure all of that is true. Which... is an enormous amount of trust to put behind Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
Eventually, the Work Asks You to Prove It
There's another reason I have fairly strong feelings about professional competence.
Before VirtuOHS, I worked operations in high-risk youth transport and child trafficking rescue. A field most people will understandably never see from the inside, but one that taught me a lot about competence, training, and the responsibility that comes with saying, "I know how to do this."
The work is highly specialized, yet from the outside, I watched people wanting to enter the field generally fall into two categories:
Men and women who legitimately wanted to make the world a better place. Helping kids. Giving back.
Others were drawn to the prestige of it. Compensation. Recognition. Maybe even the perceived importance that came with being able to say, this is what I do. You know... The Glory Story.
Though, in truth? Within those shadows, too many stories end without glory. Those that don't are held close by the people who walked there. Fought there. Left parts of themselves there. Held sacred. The real glory stories are rarely told. They become good endings that turn into new beginnings.
I watched people walk into that work before they were capable of doing it, and in that environment, there wasn't much room to pretend. You can learn the lingo. Buy the equipment. Hype your background. Even look the part. You can know all the right assurances to give a family or federal organization that you are capable of handling a contract, operation, situation, or transport.
But eventually?
The work will make you prove it.
We saw other companies accept work they said they could handle, only to call us when they realized they were neither trained nor prepared.
In high-risk work, being unprepared has very real consequences. A youth ran and was now missing in an unfamiliar city. Instead of being in our hands from the start and safely delivered to their destination, we'd been called in to track and find them—as quickly as possible. Agents from another company's team, undertrained and unprepared for what they encountered, were now recovering in hospital.
The reality is that even when everything seems to go right, there will always be the day it doesn't.
Protocol, training, and experience prepare you.
But they also prove you.
When high-risk hits the fan, whatever someone has claimed about their competence no longer matters.
The situation tests and shows the truth of what you actually know.
This happened often enough that I will always carry this with me: when you can handle the high-risk work, you don't need to say it. Your work itself proves who you are—and who you aren't.
After a failure, the parents, facility, or organization that trusted those promises and plans now had much larger challenges than the ones they started with. Our teams, highly experienced and highly specialized—for good reason—would then need to step in and manage what were often very dire consequences.
This is all learning.
There is no shame in being inexperienced. Everyone who becomes good at something starts by not knowing how to do it. You train. You learn. You ask questions. You work alongside people who know more than you do. And then? You listen when someone highly trained, knowledgeable, educated and experienced tells you you aren't ready yet.
Let confidence be the result of competence.
Problems begin when someone wants the credibility of expertise before they've done the work required to develop it. Because professional competence isn't something you can imitate indefinitely. Eventually, the work exposes whether the knowledge behind it is real.
Maybe not tomorrow.
Maybe not this month.
Maybe you'll make it a year or more. Borrowing someone else's words. Repurposing their work. Learning enough terminology to sound knowledgeable.
You may even get hired.
But sooner or later, something will happen that requires real expertise behind the work rather than the appearance of it.
And that's when the difference becomes obvious.
The Binder Eventually Has to Work
A safety program is no different.
The binder may look excellent sitting on the shelf. The policies may be beautifully written. Every heading may be in the right place. But eventually, it'll get used.
Eventually there'll be an incident.
An inspection.
A new hazard.
A difficult accommodation.
An emergency.
A regulatory question.
Or simply a worker standing in front of a supervisor asking: What am I supposed to do here?
That's when the work must hold up.
If you copied another company's program because you lacked the competence to develop one yourself, you haven't only plagiarized somebody else's work... you've handed your client something you may not have the expertise to explain, implement, or defend.
That's the part that somehow gets missed.
When you're being paid to create systems other people rely upon, pretending to possess expertise you don't have transfers the consequences of your incompetence to them. Making this more than plagiarism.
Incompetence rarely remains the sole problem of the incompetent.
In occupational health and safety, it also becomes the responsibility of the organization that trusted you—as well as the people working inside it.
Who Owns the Consequences?
That's the question nobody wants to ask until after it's all gone wrong. Who owns the consequences?
If you've represented someone else's work as your own, there may be intellectual property, contractual, or professional consequences depending on what was copied, who owns it, and the terms under which you were engaged.
But let's equally consider the company that hired you:
What happens when they discover that the customized professional work they believed they purchased wasn't customized at all?
What happens if they relied on it?
What happens if an important requirement wasn't there because the company you copied it from didn't need it?
What happens if something was there that makes absolutely no sense for their operation?
And what happens when somebody gets hurt and people start asking where the program came from, how it was developed, why it didn't address the work being performed—and who decided it was suitable in the first place?
Templates Aren't the Problem
There is nothing wrong with using frameworks, standards, properly licensed templates, regulatory guidance, or your own previously developed tools as starting points.
Good professionals don't reinvent every wheel. Experience itself means carrying knowledge from one engagement into the next. You learn what works. You develop processes. You build tools. You become faster and better at recognizing what needs attention.
That's expertise.
There's a very large difference between using your own expertise efficiently and passing somebody else's expertise off as your own. One demonstrates experience. The other demonstrates that when a client trusted you to know what you were doing, you needed somebody else's work to look like you did.
Someone will implement it.
Someone will have to answer questions about it.
Someone will make decisions using it.
Someone will have to stand behind it when something goes wrong.
Eventually, that binder will be tested.
And when it does, formatting won't save it. A fresh logo won't save it. Not even your confidence will save it.
Eventually, your work has to know what you claimed to know when you created it.
And whoever originally wrote the material you copied won't be standing there to explain it for you.
Post Script: Fellow professionals...
And to the professionals who do this work with integrity—we know you know exactly what we're talking about.
You've seen it. You've felt the frustration of watching work you've spent years learning how to do reduced to something someone else thinks they can simply copy, repackage, or imitate.
We see you, too. The professionals who keep learning. Who stay curious and ask questions. Who know the weight of saying "I know how to do this," and take that responsibility seriously. Who put in the hours nobody sees, build competence before confidence, and truly care about the quality of their work because they know someone else will someday rely on it.
Your work matters.
Whether you're making workplaces safer, protecting people, solving problems, building something better, or quietly doing excellent work that may never come with applause—you make the world safer, stronger, and brighter because you take your profession seriously.
We know you know. And we see the work you're doing.
So thank you for being you.
Want more like this? Check out our other posts on the VirtuOHS blog, Beyond the Binder.