SHEilds or Shields Health and Safety?

Shields Health and Safety isn’t quite correct!

I’d like to take a moment to address a minor but persistently raised issue regarding our company name. Many of you may ask; is it SHEilds or Shields Health and Safety?

If you’re here and you are looking at the URL bar at the top (or the logo located on the page) then you probably know the answer, ‘Shields’ Health and Safety isn’t quite correct! The actual spelling is SHEilds.

Firstly, we should probably clarify that this isn’t a spelling mistake and there is a real reason for the spelling of SHEilds.

Where did it all begin

Where did it all begin? SHEilds was founded by Mike Shields in 1995 and as you have completed the above quiz you probably now know that the SHE in SHEilds stands for Safety, Health and Environment. Although the company was started by Mike Shields, SHEilds was both a unique name and incorporated the well-known abbreviation HSE (Health Safety and Environment.) Shields would have been more difficult to abbreviate and it would be harder to get noticed with the name.

SHEilds has become recognised globally as a quality health and safety provider with highly regarded support for all SHEilds students.

What to look out for

What to look out for? We have noticed many companies using the spelling of ‘Shields’ to promote Health and Safety. We have had some bad results off the back of this, where people have given us poor ratings despite never being enrolled as a SHEilds student.

We feel that this is a little unfair due to how hard we work to bring a great learning experience to all of our students. Not only that, we try to release blogs regularly to assist with educating readers who aren’t necessarily our students.

SHEilds are working hard to constantly bring the best eLearning experience. We released the first NGC Course and have been dedicated to health and safety education longer than most. If you are looking to study with us, please ensure that you are signing up for the right SHEilds NEBOSH Qualification, and not a “Shields NEBOSH qualification.”

The problem with writing SHEilds and Shields

Another matter I’d like to highlight is the problem with writing SHEilds and Shields.

Now it isn’t an overly used word, but I will say that I do encounter issues when I am writing and I go to spell the word “shield” I have (since starting at the company) fallen into the trap of writing “SHEild” whenever I intended to write “shield.”

Of course, we all know that the rule of “E and I” in English is: “I before E except after C.” One of the few exceptions to this rule is when you are searching for a quality Health and Safety Provider!

How should you spell eLearning/E-Learning/Elearning?

Whilst we are on the topic of spellings (I know I recently did another blog addressing the NEBOSH spelling) I feel like this is one that could be mentioned; how should you spell eLearning/E-Learning/Elearning?

This is very much up for debate but there are quite a few ways that we can spell the word.

Whilst it doesn’t matter too much and is pretty much understood the same way that e-mail and email are understood, it would be nice to standardize. My personal opinion is that it should probably be spelt “e-learning”. (For those that don’t know this stands for Electronic Learning.) This could be down to the fact that I usually write e-mail as opposed to email.

I feel partially that eLearning is incorrect, and although it looks the nicest to me out of all of the above, it also reads a little bit strange to have a capitalized letter in the middle of a word.

Aside from this I think that having “Elearning” as one word may also be moderately confusing for someone whose first language isn’t English. Having the hyphen after the “E” puts a little bit of an emphasis on the letter.

There is no way set in stone, yet I think standardization is required to make it easier to understand.

So make sure you search for SHEilds E-Learning and not Shields elearning.

Stephen Conlan