A group of safety experts has been working on a problem that most park visitors never consider: how do you train a ride operator in Jakarta or Dubai to the same standard as one in Ohio when the regulatory environment, the language, and the local expectations of what a safety protocol looks like are all different? This problem is being worked on in a conference room somewhere on the edges of a trade show floor, perhaps in Orlando or Las Vegas, the two cities where the amusement industry tends to do its most serious talking. The AIMS International board has begun reconstructing its response to that query, and the outline of the reform is starting to take shape.
North America has historically been the focus of AIMS International, the organization in charge of safety training and certification for the entertainment sector. Although the amusement industry itself has grown into Asia, the Middle East, and Europe at a rate that the training infrastructure hasn’t fully kept up with, the benchmarks it operates from—mainly the ASTM F24 committee standards, the technical specifications that govern how rides are designed, tested, and maintained—were primarily created by and for a North American market.
By matching its courses with both ASTM F24 requirements and European EN standards, the new board’s approach immediately fills that gap by enabling operators and inspectors from other regulatory systems to employ the same fundamental foundation for hazard prevention. It seems to be an administrative change. In actuality, it is something far more substantial.
The most obvious aspect of the change is the regional expansion. Instead of asking participants to translate foreign frameworks into their own contexts, the AIMS Asia Pacific Safety Seminar is a conscious attempt to place safety programming close to the markets where the industry is expanding the fastest, and to deliver it in the languages that those markets actually operate in, tailored to the local regulatory context.
It seems like this was long overdue. For many years, parks have been opening throughout Southeast Asia and the Gulf region. The operators and technicians that operate there were either not trained to any standard framework at all or were trained to standards that didn’t fully match their local environment. The industry has not publicly highlighted how important it is to close that gap.
The board’s approach at both ends of the professional development spectrum is completed by two more recent initiatives. The Academy of Amusement Risk Management, Safety, and Security (AARMSS) certification is a two-year structured certificate designed for safety and security professionals who deal with the increasingly complicated danger landscape that big entertainment venues today have to cope with.
This covers not only technical safety but also crowd control, emergency response, and the kind of security planning that is now necessary for every event that attracts a sizable number of people. The program’s two-year duration indicates that the board is treating this area of expertise seriously rather than as a marketing gimmick, even though it didn’t previously have an official credential.
A more straightforward but enduring obstacle is addressed by the AIMS connectedED learning platform: the expense and duration of overseas travel necessary to keep certifications. A logistical barrier that was subtly restricting who may take part in the professional development structure is removed by an IACET-accredited online system that enables professionals to earn continuing education units from any location.
How soon the digital platform is adopted in areas where online credentialing is less common is yet unknown. However, the goal is obvious, and observing the board work concurrently on digital access, regional presence, and standards harmonization reads less like incremental improvement and more like a purposeful reconsideration of what global safety certification actually needs to entail.
