Risk assessment and risk management at your organisation

Risk assessment and risk management at your organisation

Risk assessment and risk management at your organisation

Risk assessment and risk management at your organisation should be a continuous process. It involves best practices like identifying, assessing and mitigating risks.

Risk assessment is the process of identifying and analysing the hazards, risks, and threats to an organisation. A risk assessment is a process to identify and evaluate the potential risks and threats to an organisation’s people, property, reputation, or mission. It includes vulnerability mapping, which helps identify where an organisation might be vulnerable to future threats or hazards. Many organisations have access to a wide range of risk assessments tools such as issue identification tools for identifying risks in operations or training courses, incident reporting tools for communication between organisations about potential incidents, safety alert systems for communication between organisations about safety issues etc.

Risk management is the process of reducing the impact or probability of a hazardous, risky, or threatening event from occurring by taking protective measures. Risk management is important as it helps the companies to identify the hazards as early as possible and take actions to mitigate those hazards. Risk Management is an ongoing process that should involve risk assessments, mitigation of identified risks, and continuous monitoring of progress towards achieving this goal.

The best way to prevent risks in your organisation is by putting in place risk assessment and risk management strategies. They can identify risks that could potentially lead to negative outcomes and/or damage the reputation of your organisation.

The most common risk assessment strategies are using formal or informal questionnaires to gather data on risky behaviours, incidents, and environmental factors that may present risks to people or property.

Some examples include:

- A questionnaire asking employees about their job satisfaction levels or students for their course satisfaction levels.
- A questionnaire asking employees about their thoughts on compensation plans for long term absences from work
- A questionnaire asking employees about their thoughts on how often they work overtime hours

When should organisations implement these strategies?

Before you start operating, you need to establish all the risks present in your operating environment, the best ways to assess, mitigate and manage them.

The benefits of risk assessment and risk management

Risk assessment and risk management can help to:

- Strengthen organisational resilience by providing the right information to the right people at the right time.
- Improve employee safety, wellbeing, wellbeing and motivation.
- Increase productivity by improving transparency in decision-making processes.

Examples of risk assessment techniques are an audit of student records, evaluating your financial reports, human resource policies, physical security procedures, workplace health and safety practices, the building design process for fire safety. Examples of risk management strategies are assessing work content risks while planning activities or using the job rotation principle while organising work schedules, having more than one trainer and assessor for each course etc.


Call us on 1800 266 160 or email info@caqa.com.au to find out more regarding how we can help you with risk assessments and risk management.

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Sukh Sandhu

Executive Director

Sukh has been working in the VET and Higher Education Industry for over 25 years. In this time, he has held several roles with RTO's and Higher Education Providers (HEP) including CEO roles for International Colleges and National Compliance and Quality Assurance Manager roles for several RTO's, TAFE's and Universities. Sukh has also worked for the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) as a Business Systems Project Official. Sukh is a Canadian permanent resident and Australian citizen.

Sukh has had extensive project management experience in risk management, compliance, administration and as a training consultant. He has extensive knowledge in government compliance standards and has participated in nearly one hundred audits across Australia and provided consultancy advice regarding ASQA/VRQA, TEQSA, ACPET, DET-HESG, VQF/Higher Education, ELICOS, NEAS, ANMAC, AHPRA, CRICOS, ESOS and ISO.

Sukh is a member of several independent professional organisations and government bodies including, ACPET, VELG, ACS, AITD, MARA, MIA, ISANA, APEX, IEEE, The Internet Society (Global Member), AISIP, IAMOT, ACM, OISV, APACALL, IWA, Eta Kappa Nu, EDSIG and several others.

Sukh's qualifications include two MBAs, three masters in IT and systems, a Graduate diploma of management learning, Diploma in training design and development, Diploma in vocational education training, Diploma of work, health and safety, Diploma of Quality Auditing, Advanced diploma of management, Advanced diploma in marketing, human resources, information technology, and a number of other courses and qualifications. He has been working as a lecturer and as a trainer and assessor since 1998, Sukh has been a vocal advocate of audit reforms and system centred auditing practices rather than auditor centred auditing practices for many years.