A 13-year cop turned safety leader on the one thing safety school leaves out.

“Get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” 

Jake Wenmark did not grow up wanting to be a safety professional. He grew up wanting to be a cop, went to school for it, and spent 13 years doing the job. Today he is the Vice President of Risk & Safety at KE (Knobelsdorff Electric), a fast-growing company out of Goodhue, Minnesota, with Electrical, Automation, Power Services, and Energy divisions, where he helps keep hundreds of field workers safe on high-hazard jobs. Before that came four years at Vail Resorts, overseeing safety across 26 resorts in its eastern region. He calls himself, cheerfully and often, “a very non-traditional safety professional.” That is exactly what makes him worth listening to. 

The uncomfortable leap 

When Jake left policing for the ski industry, he had no safety background to fall back on. “I didn’t have an OSHA 30, I didn’t have anything,” he says. He was walking away from a profession he had trained his whole adult life for, into one he knew nothing about. He calls it “a wildly uncomfortable situation,” and that discomfort is the whole point. “If you’re feeling comfortable in something, you’re not doing enough,” he says. “You can’t grow unless you feel uncomfortable.” The other half of the advice is quieter: “Don’t undersell yourself. You can do more than you think you can.” 

The appetite for that discomfort did not come from nowhere. The person Jake credits most was his grandfather, a heavy-equipment mechanic who loved garage sales and turned them into lessons. He would set something on his workbench, hand it over, and give one instruction. “Here, Jake, take this coffee maker part,” Jake remembers, and “tell me how it works” when I come back down. No shortcuts, but a kid who felt fully supported going off to figure it out. Take it apart, learn how it works: that is how Jake has approached every job since. 

Relationship, relationship, relationship 

Ask Jake what separates a good safety professional from a great one and he does not start with technical knowledge. “I can teach anybody about safety,” he says. What is harder to teach, and what he thinks the safety schools skip, is how to talk to people. Plenty of programs turn out professionals who know the rules and processes cold, “but what they don’t know how to do is communicate with people.” 

For Jake that is the foundation. When a new safety professional joins his team, their first months are not about compliance. The job is to connect with everyone they will work with, from senior leaders to field crews, and get to know them as people. “I don’t care about your qualifications,” he says of a new hire. “All your qualifications, all the knowledge you have means nothing” until that relationship is there. Or, as he puts it more than once: “It’s just relationship, relationship, relationship.” 

Build the program with the field, not above it   

Jake has a name for what safety becomes when it’s imposed from the top down. The department “just becomes the cops,” the thorn in everyone’s side. It is a pointed thing for a 13-year former officer to say, and he says it on purpose. 

The alternative is to build things with the field instead of handing them down to it. When he arrived at KE, the company had no incident-management system and was still tracking incidents on paper. Rather than buy something and impose it, the KE team built their own in-house, with the field giving feedback the entire way, so the crews had a stake in it before it launched. Reporting climbed so far that, by Jake’s count, roughly 60% of what comes in now are near misses and good catches rather than injuries after the fact. Safety professionals, he warns, too easily assume they know best. “They might have the better point of view,” he says of the workers, and if you are not open to that, you never earn the buy-in that makes any of it work.

The numbers that actually matter 

This is also why Jake is impatient with how the industry treats its metrics. In construction, he argues, recordable-injury rates get massaged to win bids, which quietly rewards companies for not reporting. His own recordable rate went up once reporting improved, while the EMR, the number that tracks real claims cost, went down and comp costs stayed low. “Zero is not realistic in the construction industry,” he says flatly. “Let’s just be honest.” What excites him about where safety is heading runs along the same line: the energy-based safety work of researchers like Dr. Matt Hallowell at the Construction Safety Research Alliance. Recordable injuries have fallen for years, and fatalities have not. Moving that number, Jake believes, means being willing to challenge how things have always been done. 

Eating the humble pie 

If there is one message Jake would put in front of every safety professional, it is a warning against certainty. “Just because of the way we’ve always done it doesn’t mean it’s the right way,” he says. “Safety should never be an ivory tower.” He includes himself in that. “None of us know anything more than anybody else, and we should always be eating our humble pie.” The egos, in his words, “need to be checked.” 

What is left when you check them is the thing he keeps circling back to. Show up as the best version of yourself, stay curious, and get comfortable being uncomfortable, because that is where you grow into someone the people around you are safer for having. It is the same lesson he first got at a workbench years ago, holding a coffee maker he could not yet fix: take it apart, learn how it works, and come back to show what you found.