What this is
What is a worker profile?
What is a worker profile?
A worker profile is the master record for one person: who they are, their employment type, every site and role they hold, and the emergency responsibilities assigned to them at each site. It is not an event form. It exists so that training, incident, health and safety-programme records have a single, stable person to link to instead of each holding its own copy of a name and job title.
Who maintains a worker profile, and who else touches it?
HR or an administrator creates and maintains the core record: identity, employment type, start and end dates. Site assignments, job task, emergency role and safety-sensitive status are typically set with input from the line manager or safety function at each site, because HR alone does not know who does what work where. Both sides need write access, or the register drifts into whichever team happens to remember to update it.
What happens to the profile when someone leaves?
The Status field moves to Leaver and, ideally, an End Date is set on the current site assignment, but the row itself is not deleted. Training, incident and health records already reference this Person ID, and removing the row orphans that history. The profile simply stops appearing in Active-filtered pick lists once its status is correctly set, which is the mechanism that is most often forgotten rather than the deletion, which is rare.
Scope
When is a worker profile required?
This register holds the person. It does not hold their competence, their health information, their access credentials, or the commercial detail of the company that supplies them if they are a contractor. Using it for any of those produces a profile that looks complete and isn't.
Use this template when
- A new person joins, on any employment type, and needs a Person ID before any other record can link to them
- An existing worker changes site, role, department, shift or reporting line and the assignment needs a new or updated row
- A worker's emergency responsibilities change at a given site: they become or stop being a first aider, fire warden or spill responder
- A worker leaves and the record needs its status and end dates set so downstream pick lists stop offering them
- A safety-sensitive designation needs to be recorded against a specific assignment because it has been justified and documented elsewhere
Do not use it for
- Site and Location Register, which holds the sites themselves; a worker's site assignment links to it rather than duplicating site detail here
- Job and Task Register, which defines the tasks; this profile links to a task through Job Task rather than describing the work
- Vendor and Contractor Register, which holds the contracting company's commercial and qualification data for a contractor firm, not the individual sent to site
- Competency Framework Register or the training records themselves, which hold what a person can actually do, as opposed to what role they hold
- Health records, which belong in KnowHealth precisely because the Notes field here says not to put health information in it
Compliance mapping
Which ISO 45001 cl.7.2 requirements does this satisfy?
Personnel records sit at the junction of three separate duties: occupational health and safety competence, employment record-keeping, and data protection. None of the three prescribes this exact form, but each expects the underlying facts, who someone is, what they are competent to do, and what personal data is held about them, to be current and retrievable.
| Clause | Requirement | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Competence needed for roles affecting OH&S performance is determined, and evidence of competence is retained | Site assignments |
| ISO 45001 cl.5.4 | Consultation and participation of workers, including their representatives and reporting lines, is established and maintained | Site assignments |
| ISO 45001 cl.8.1.4 | Processes for controlling externally provided workers, including contractors and agency staff, are established | Identification |
| HSE Health and Safety (First Aid) Regulations 1981, reg.3 | Adequate and appropriate first-aid provision, based on an assessment of needs, with sufficient trained first-aiders | Site assignments |
| OSHA 29 CFR 1910.38 | Emergency action plan names employees with duties to assist safe evacuation, and workers must know who they are | Site assignments |
| ISO 45001 cl.7.5.3 | Documented information is controlled, remains legible, identifiable, and available where and when it is needed | Employment |
| GDPR Art.5(1)(c),(e) | Personal data is adequate, relevant, limited to what is necessary, and kept no longer than the purpose requires | Safety relevant detail |
| ISO 45001 cl.7.4 | Internal communication processes ensure relevant OH&S information reaches the right people at the right levels | Identification |
What it does not cover
- Training and competency record, which is where evidence that a person can actually do the job named in Job Title and Job Task is held, not this profile.
- Health record, which belongs in KnowHealth and must never be entered in the Notes field here, exactly as that field's own help text says.
- Emergency action plan, which is the document describing how an evacuation or spill response actually runs; naming someone's Emergency Role here does not itself discharge that planning duty.
- Worker equipment and system provisioning, which grants and revokes the physical access, keys and logins a person needs, tracked as its own record rather than inferred from this one.
- Vendor and Contractor Register, which holds the contracting company's assessment, qualification and commercial terms when Employment Type is Agency or Contractor.
Global
Worker Profile requirements by country
The duty to know who is doing the work, and to hold their personal data lawfully while doing so, is close to universal. What differs is how prescriptive the recordkeeping and data-protection regimes are.
OSHA 29 CFR 1904 recordkeeping; state privacy statutes
No single federal personnel-record standard, but injury logs must tie to identifiable employees, and several states now regulate HR data directly.
A profile that cannot be reliably matched to the injury log by Person ID undermines the recordkeeping the log itself depends on.
UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018
Health data is a special category requiring explicit lawful basis; ordinary employment data needs only a standard one.
Keeping health information out of the Notes field is not tidiness, it keeps this register outside obligations that KnowHealth is built to satisfy.
GDPR Art.5, Art.9
Data minimisation and storage limitation apply to every field held here; Art.9 imposes a stricter regime the moment health data is mixed in.
Regulators examining an HR system look first at whether special-category data has leaked into general fields, exactly the risk a free-text Notes field creates.
PIPEDA and provincial equivalents
Collection limited to what a reasonable person would consider appropriate for the stated purpose, with consent and access rights attached.
Emergency contact detail is defensible as necessary; open-ended notes accumulate data with no defined purpose, the pattern regulators query first.
Privacy Act 1988, Australian Privacy Principles
APP 11 requires reasonable steps to protect personal information, with notification once a breach is likely to cause serious harm.
A register holding emergency contacts and employment history for hundreds of workers is its own breach-notification exposure.
ISO 45001 cl.7.2, cl.5.4
Competence and consultation are management-system requirements applied wherever the standard is certified.
An auditor checking cl.7.2 expects this profile cited as the starting point for competence needs, not the end point.
How to complete it
How to complete a worker profile, step by step
Filling in the fields on a new joiner is the easy half. The half that determines whether the register is still trustworthy a year later is a set of ongoing judgement calls nobody is prompted to make.
Status should flip to Leaver on the day access and duties actually end, not at the next convenient administrative cycle. Every pick list filtered to Active reads this field in real time, so a delay of weeks means someone who no longer works there can still be assigned training or listed as an emergency contact.
Where a person holds more than one site row, Primary Assignment must resolve to a single Yes. Templates displaying one site for a person read whichever row is marked primary, and two primaries, or none, makes that display arbitrary.
A fire warden or first aider designation is tied to training and briefing at a specific site. Carrying it forward automatically when someone transfers, rather than reassessing at the new site, produces a register that says a role is covered when it isn't.
Training, incident and health records already reference this Person ID, and deleting the row breaks every one of those links retroactively. The correct discipline is status and end dates, kept indefinitely.
What auditors find
Most common worker profile findings
Audit findings against this register rarely concern a field being left blank. They concern the record being true on the day it was written and wrong by the time anyone checked again.
| Finding | Clause | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| A worker shown Active left the organisation weeks or months earlier. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5.3 | Make Status change part of the offboarding step itself, triggered the day access is revoked. |
| A person has two site assignment rows both marked Primary, or none at all. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5.3 | Enforce exactly one Primary Assignment per active worker whenever a new site row is added. |
| Emergency Role was carried forward after a site transfer without reassessment at the new site. | HSE First Aid Regulations 1981, reg.3 | Require a fresh emergency-role decision, tied to actual training at the new site. |
| Health information was recorded in the free-text Notes field. | GDPR Art.9 | Remove it immediately, route it to the health record, and audit the field periodically for recurrence. |
| A downstream pick list references a typed worker name rather than the Person ID, and drifts once the name is corrected. | GDPR Art.5(1)(d) | Confirm every linking template resolves through Person ID, not free text. |
| Employment Type is recorded as Permanent for someone actually supplied by an agency. | ISO 45001 cl.8.1.4 | Correct the Employment Type and confirm the agency's oversight and induction duties are met separately. |
| Safety Sensitive is ticked with no supporting justification retained anywhere. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Require the justification documented, in a risk assessment or competency record, at the point the box is ticked. |
| Reports To names a supervisor who has since left the organisation. | ISO 45001 cl.5.4 | Reassign Reports To as part of the supervisor's own offboarding. |
| A leaver's profile was deleted rather than status-changed, breaking links from historic training and incident records. | ISO 45001 cl.7.5.3 | Reinstate the row where possible; adopt a policy that profiles are retired, never deleted. |
| A new starter's first shift occurred before their profile existed, leaving induction records with nothing to link to. | ISO 45001 cl.7.2 | Create the Person ID at pre-arrival stage, ahead of the first shift, not on or after it. |
Case in point
Case in point: the fire warden who transferred sites
A production operative at Site A held an assignment row marked Fire Warden, reflecting a genuine assessment and briefing carried out when the appointment was made. Six months later the worker transferred permanently to Site B. HR added a new site assignment row for Site B and, to save re-entering detail, copied the existing row's fields across, Emergency Role included.
A fire alarm test at Site B weeks later found no trained warden on the day shift. The profile said otherwise: it listed the transferred worker as a warden, exactly as at Site A. What it did not reflect was that the worker had never been assessed, briefed or trained for that role at Site B, and the site's actual warden vacancy, open since someone else left three months earlier, had never been filled because the register appeared to already show coverage.
The register was not lying by omission, it was lying by inheritance. Emergency Role had been treated as a fact about the person, carried from row to row, when it is a fact about the site: an appointment made once, for one place, that has to be made again, deliberately, whenever the place changes.
The template
The template, field by field
The form exactly as it installs. Every field, option, score and conditional rule is editable, and the links to other templates come with it.
4 sections
- Reference
- FDN-003
- Archetype
- Register
- Record ID
- PER-2026-000
- Scoring
- None
- Direction
- n/a
- Singleton
- Yes
- Basis
- ISO 45001 cl.7.2
- Links
- Referenced by KnowTrain, KnowHealth, KnowSafe
- Tags
- Master data
- Sections
- 4
- Fields
- 27
- Follow up fields
- 0
- Repeating sections
- 1
- Links out
- 2
Identification
6 fieldsPerson ID*
Format PER-0000. The linkable key, since the Users field cannot be linked.
The record's own ID. Other templates point at this value.
Status*
Only Active workers appear in Pick Lists.
Worker Name*
This is what Pick Lists display.
System User
Connects this profile to their login, where they have one.
Employee Number
Numeric key joining to your HR or payroll system.
Links to External system reference
Employment Type*
Employee, temporary, agency or contractor.
- Permanent3 pts
- Agency1 pt
- Contractor1 pt
Employment
3 fieldsStart Date*
End Date
Sites Assigned*
Every site this person works at. Their role at each one is set out below.
Site assignments
Repeats15 fieldsAssignment Site*
One row per site. A person can hold a different role at each site they work at.
Assignment Site ID*
Format SITE-000.
Links to FDN-001 Site ID
Primary Assignment*
Exactly one row should be the primary. It is what appears where a single site is shown.
Job Title*
Their role at this site, which need not match their role elsewhere.
Department*
Shift
Job Task
Connects this assignment to the risk and ergonomic assessments for that work.
Job ID
Format JOB-000.
Links to FDN-004 Job Task ID
Reports To
Their supervisor at this site.
Emergency Role
First aider, fire warden, spill responder or none. Held per site, since somebody can be a warden at one site and not another.
Safety Sensitive At This Site*
Tick only where the designation is justified and documented for this assignment.
Assignment Status*
Only Active assignments appear in Pick Lists filtered by site.
Assignment Start Date
When they began this role at this site.
Assignment End Date
Days Per Week At This Site
Safety relevant detail
3 fieldsEmergency Contact Name
Emergency Contact Number
Notes
Do not record health information here. Health records live in KnowHealth.
FDN-003 · record IDs look like PER-2026-000 · Referenced by KnowTrain, KnowHealth, KnowSafe
Open in KnowellaRun it with agents
From a document you fill in to a programme that runs itself
The profile itself is simple to fill in. What actually fails is everything around it: the status nobody flips on the day it matters, the emergency role nobody reassesses on transfer, and the site assignment nobody notices has two primaries.
Reads Job Title and Job Task off each assignment to determine what competence a worker needs, and flags where the training record hasn't caught up with a role change.
Holds the health information this register is deliberately built to exclude, and is the destination whenever a Notes field is found carrying it instead.
Cross-checks Emergency Role against actual training and site coverage, and surfaces sites left without a first aider or fire warden after a transfer.
Watches offboarding and role-change events across the library and raises the Status or assignment update the moment it should happen, rather than waiting for someone to notice the drift.
This template lives in General — control tower. The orchestration layer. Registries and engines every other workspace reads from.
Meet General→Glossary
Worker Profile definitions and key terms
- Person ID
- The stable key, format PER-0000, that every other template links to. It is what makes the profile findable regardless of name changes or corrections, and it is the field that should be linked rather than a typed name.
- Primary Assignment
- The single site assignment, among possibly several for one person, that other templates read when they need to display a single site for that worker.
- Safety-sensitive designation
- A flag on a specific assignment indicating the role carries elevated OH&S consequence, intended to be ticked only where a documented justification exists elsewhere.
- Emergency Role
- A per-site appointment, such as first aider, fire warden or spill responder, arising from a specific assessment and briefing at that location rather than a general attribute of the person.
- Employment Type
- Whether a worker is permanent, agency or contractor, which determines which other duties, induction, oversight, contractor management, apply alongside this profile.
- Special category data
- Under GDPR and equivalent regimes, data such as health information that requires a stricter lawful basis than ordinary personal data, which is why it is excluded from this register by design.
- Register drift
- The gap between what a master-data record says and what is currently true, growing whenever an event, a leaver, a transfer, a role change, is not reflected in the record at the time it happens.
- Job Task link
- The connection from a site assignment to the Job and Task Register, which is what allows risk and ergonomic assessments to be tied to actual work rather than to a job title alone.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about worker profile
Should we delete a profile once someone leaves?+
No. Set Status to Leaver and close out the assignment with an end date, but keep the row. Training, incident and health records already reference the Person ID, and deleting it orphans that history rather than tidying it.
Why link on Person ID rather than the worker's name?+
Names get corrected, people marry, spellings vary. Person ID does not change, so every downstream link built on it survives a name correction intact. A pick list built on typed names silently breaks the moment a name is edited.
Who should be able to edit this register, HR or the site?+
Both, for different fields. HR owns identity, employment type and dates. The site or line manager owns the assignment detail because they are the only ones who reliably know it changed. Restricting edit rights to HR alone is the most common cause of stale site assignments.
Do agency and contractor workers need a full profile here?+
Yes, at minimum enough to identify and assign them safely: site, role, emergency responsibilities if any. Their employer's commercial detail belongs in the Vendor and Contractor Register, but the individual on site still needs to exist here, or incident and training records have nobody to link to.
What actually happens if the Notes field is used for health information?+
It sits unprotected by whatever access controls and retention rules apply to genuine health records, visible to anyone with ordinary access here. Move it to KnowHealth immediately on discovery; the field's own help text exists to prevent this happening at all.
How is the 'roughly 175 pickers filter to Active' figure meaningful in practice?+
A single Status field on this register determines whether a person is offered as an option across most of the library. A status left unflipped after someone leaves does not fail quietly in one place; it fails wherever that person could still be picked.
Keep going
Related templates and programmes
Industries this is written for
Programmes this belongs to
Worker Onboarding and Induction
New and temporary workers who know what to do before they touch anything.
Master Data and Foundations
One place for each thing, so a change updates everywhere rather than in eight lists.
Worker Onboarding and Offboarding
Nobody starting unprepared, and nobody leaving with access they still hold.
Used together in Worker Onboarding and Induction
Contractor Site Induction
Introduces a contractor to your site rules, hazards, emergency arrangements and permit requirements
Temporary and Agency Worker Review
Reviews whether agency and short term workers receive the same induction, training and supervision as permanent staff
New Hire Orientation
Introduces a new worker to the company, the site and how things are done here
Site Safety Induction
Covers the hazards and rules specific to this site, with photographs of the real areas
Department Orientation
Introduces the specific department, its work, its people and its risks
Job Specific Training Record
Records the hands on training for the actual job the person will do
More in Registries
Site and Location Register
Holds every site, building, area and zone your organisation operates
Asset Register
Holds every piece of equipment, machine, vehicle and tool you track
Job and Task Register
Lists the jobs and tasks people perform, so risk assessments and ergonomic assessments can be tied to real work rather than job titles
Vendor and Contractor Register
Holds every supplier, contractor and service provider you work with, including their status and approval level
Chemical and Substance Register
Lists every chemical and hazardous substance held on site, with quantity, location and hazard class
Course Catalog
Lists every training course available, with its length, validity period and who needs it
Written and reviewed by
Siddarth Singh
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Knowella
Certified Safety Professional and industrial and systems engineer with more than a decade inside food supply chain, freight and manufacturing operations. This page was written against the current text of the standards it cites, not against secondary summaries of them.
- Certified Safety Professional (CSP), Board of Certified Safety Professionals
- MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- MS and BS, The Ohio State University, Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Six Sigma Black Belt
Sources and last review. Reviewed 16 August 2026 against:
- ISO 45001:2018 clauses 7.2, 5.4, 8.1.4, 7.5.3 and 7.4
- Health and Safety (First Aid) Regulations 1981, regulation 3 (GB)
- OSHA 29 CFR 1910.38, Emergency action plans (US)
- OSHA 29 CFR 1904, Recording and reporting occupational injuries and illnesses (US)
- UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, special category data provisions
- GDPR Articles 5 and 9, principles relating to processing and special categories of personal data
This page is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm requirements with your jurisdiction’s regulator.