Potentially, but by "safe" I really meant "someplace where they can't do too much damage to the company" along with "someplace where not very much of critical import will be expected of them". The phrase 'Mostly Harmless' comes to mind.
For instance, I worked in a place that measured the cost of unscheduled mainframe downtime at $250K / hour. There wasn't any such thing as a small mistake there, and there certainly wasn't time to sit around, discuss the situation in committee, and come up with a game plan when there was a problem. Meanwhile, I'm currently - right this second - reading the 3rd Recall EMail notice from our HR person where she screwed up sending out the date on some class or other.
There aren't too many senior engineers (who are trusted with anything, lol) that are equal opportunity hires. And, I'd add that of those I've worked with who could be considered equal-opportunity hires - they would be very, very upset if one were to suggest they got to where they are in any other way than on their qualifications. The lady on our server team, for instance, works as hard or harder than everyone else and would stick a pencil in the back of your head just for thinking she didn't belong there. And she'd be right.
Dunno how much time you've spent in business, but really, all HR and training do is implement excutive initiatives. For a while, I naively thought that HR was my advocate. HA! Not hardly.