Industrial rope access was developed initially from methods used in caving. Rope access provides a safe, efficient and generally cost effective mode of working at height and enables work to be carried out safely and effectively in difficult to reach areas, allowing access to the most tricky of areas. Rope access is less obtrusive and almost always quicker and cheaper than scaffolding or a cherry picker, and one of the great benefits of industrial rope access is that a rope access team can be in and out with the minimum of disruption. Whats more, at the end of a day rope access kit is easy to dismantle and remove, minimising the security risk of leaving it onsite.

Safety is paramount in industrial rope access. Each industrial rope access worker uses two ropes at all times, a backup safety line and a working line and each rope has a seperate point of anchorage. Any job requires two rope access technicians for added safety, and each is highly trained and is required to retrain at least every three years.

In the early days of industrial rope access it was widely used offshore on the North sea oil and gas platforms for inspections, but since then has spread onshore and is used in a variety of ways in the industrial sector.

There are five main areas that industrial rope access technicians usually work in: 1. building maintenance and repair, 2. high level cleaning and window cleaning and high level painting, 3. inspection and testing, 4. Geotechnical work & Civil engineering.