High quality performance in practice is an aspiration of the ergonomics profession today and Ergonomics Societies throughout the world are seeking to determine the most effective ways of ensuring that this objective is met. The status of a profession in the community relates in part to the effectiveness of practice by those within the profession and this, in turn, relies on the quality of performance of those practitioners (Bullock, 1995). Established as an interdisciplinary science, ergonomics has drawn on the knowledge, skills and attributes of a wide variety of disciplines. It has also had to develop its own body of knowledge and its own methodologies by research, particularly in the application of its objectives of enhancing well-being, safety and performance in purposeful human activity (Ferguson, 1987). The complexity of the science of ergonomics has needed a system of methodological principles to regulate its research and practical applications and it has found this in the systems approach. Systems analysis is particularly suited to research of compound problems, prefers multi aspect and multi disciplinary research, and treats modelling as a basic method (Franus, 1991). Without this approach, a subdiscipline working alone may avoid the broader perspective. However, in an ergonomics team, each consultant applies knowledge of the subdiscipline to the common problem in order to develop the most effective multidisciplinary solution. Nevertheless, not all tasks require participation of all subdisciplines and some fuzzy boundaries exist between the competence of subdisciplines. Such difficulties should be overcome for the sake of effective interaction and this can be done in part through the approach to education and its standards, and also by addressing the overall competencies of the ergonomist.
