THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CONTINUOUS SPECIALISTS' PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE IMPROVEMENT IN THE OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY FIELD IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CONDITIONS
In the pandemic context, new challenges are emerging for occupational safety specialists - they are new risks. Occupational safety specialists often have responsibility for the employees' health protecting accomplishing medical workers functions along with their functions in the labor protection field. For example, they are competencies related to social security ensuring for special employees' category, which risk of infection with a virus is an occupational risk. An occupational safety specialist will be able to manage new risks if his professional competence increases. Traditional approaches in the context of a pandemic often cannot be used due to the activity type specifics. Continuous professional competence improvement of occupational safety specialists using express methods will help to solve this problem in such conditions. The paper proposes the digital transformation concept of continuous occupational safety specialists' professional competence improvement, for example, in pandemic conditions. A specific example shows the effectiveness of using the express method to increase the occupational safety specialists' professional competence. The experiment showed that the social protection of the most vulnerable workers category increased by 35% ensuing this method application to ensure timely full participation of occupational safety specialists in risk management in the COVID-19 pandemic conditions.Recommendations are given on the use of the express method for the operational solution of problems related to the need to improve the OSSPS at coal industry enterprises.