How to Pick an ASNT Level III to Sign Off Your Written Practice

What a Written Practice Actually Is, and Why It Matters Who Signs It

Every NDT department along the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor — whether it's a fabrication shop feeding pressure vessels into Baytown, a service provider running UT crews through the Houston Ship Channel, or an in-house inspection group at a Beaumont-Port Arthur refinery — operates its NDT personnel qualification program off one governing document: the written practice. Under ASNT SNT-TC-1A, the written practice is the internal document an employer establishes to define how it trains, examines, certifies, and re-certifies its own NDT personnel in each method it uses: ultrasonic (UT), radiographic (RT), magnetic particle (MT), liquid penetrant (PT), visual (VT), eddy current (ET), and increasingly TOFD and phased array UT (PAUT). It spells out minimum training hours by level and method, required work experience, vision testing frequency, examination content and passing scores, and the procedure for granting, renewing, and revoking certification.

How Atlantis authors and signs a practice is set out on NDT written practice development; ongoing cover after sign-off sits under our NDT Level III consulting services.

The written practice is not paperwork for paperwork's sake. It is the document an auditor, a client's quality group, or an ASME/API code inspector will ask to see the moment they want to know whether the technician who just performed a UT scan on a girth weld — or the RT tech who shot film on a tank floor plate — is actually qualified to have done so. If the written practice is thin, outdated, or internally inconsistent with the procedures it's supposed to support, every certification issued under it is exposed to challenge.

That's why SNT-TC-1A recommends — and nearly every serious NDT organization requires — that the written practice be developed and/or approved by an ASNT NDT Level III, the person in the qualification chain expected to understand code requirements, examination design, and the breadth of methods and materials well enough to build a document that will actually hold up. Picking the right Level III for this job is a decision that affects every certification your company issues until the next revision. It deserves more scrutiny than most companies give it.

Two Very Different Things Called "ASNT Level III"

The single biggest point of confusion buyers run into — and the first thing to get straight before you vet anyone — is that "ASNT Level III" describes two different credentialing paths, and they are not interchangeable.

The first is employer-based Level III certification under SNT-TC-1A. SNT-TC-1A is a recommended practice, not a consensus standard: the employer certifies its own personnel, following ASNT's guidelines on training hours, experience, and exams, through its own written practice. A Level III certified this way was qualified by an employer — their own, a client company, or a consulting Level III's own written practice — not by ASNT directly. This is completely legitimate and is how most Level IIIs in industrial NDT are credentialed. But the title alone tells you nothing about which employer's written practice, which exam, and which scope of methods that person was actually qualified against.

The second path is ASNT's own central certification, issued through ASNT's ASNT 9712 (which replaced ACCP, the former ASNT Central Certification Program) via direct examination administered by ASNT itself. An ASNT 9712-certified Level III holds a credential issued directly by the certifying body, not by an employer's internal process. It's a different kind of proof — closer in spirit to a licensing exam than an internal qualification.

There's a third reference point worth knowing: ANSI/ASNT CP-189, a true consensus standard (unlike SNT-TC-1A's "recommended practice" status) that some clients — particularly in nuclear and federal contracting — specify instead of or alongside SNT-TC-1A. A written practice built to satisfy CP-189 differs from one built purely to SNT-TC-1A, and a Level III who has only worked under one may need to adjust for the other.

None of these paths is inherently "better" in the abstract — they answer different questions. What matters is that you, as the buyer, know which one you're getting and ask the candidate to show supporting documentation: the certificate itself, the scope of methods and levels it covers, the date of issue and expiration or renewal cycle, and — for employer-based certification — the written practice and examinations it was issued under. A Level III consultant who can't produce this paper trail on request is not someone you want developing your own company's qualification records.

Match Experience to Your Methods and Your Industry

A Level III credential establishes a floor of competence across methods and a demonstrated ability to interpret codes and write procedures. It does not establish that the person understands your industry's failure mechanisms, inspection intervals, or the practical realities of your inspection environment. This is where a lot of written practices quietly go wrong: a technically valid document gets built by someone whose real-world depth is in a different domain entirely.

Consider two Level IIIs, both properly credentialed. One spent fifteen years doing UT and MT on refinery pressure vessels and storage tanks along the Baton Rouge-to-New Orleans chemical corridor, fluent in API 653 in-service tank inspection context, and has written qualification procedures for crews doing shell and floor scanning during turnarounds. The other built a career in aerospace composite inspection — eddy current and advanced UT on airframe structures, working to entirely different acceptance criteria. Both are legitimate Level IIIs. Neither is automatically the right fit for your fabrication shop, pipeline integrity program, or storage tank inspection crew.

Before you engage anyone, ask directly: which methods have you personally practiced at Level II or higher, in which industries, and for how long? If your work is process piping and pressure vessel fabrication feeding facilities around Deer Park or Freeport, you want a Level III whose UT, RT, and PT background is grounded in that world — someone who has sat through a code inspector's audit of a fabrication shop's NDT records, not just studied the code in the abstract. If your scope includes tank floor and shell inspection or turnaround work, API in-service inspection context (API 510, 570, 653) should be part of their working vocabulary — though those API credentials are separate inspector certifications, not something bundled into an SNT-TC-1A written practice.

The practical test: ask the candidate to walk you through how they'd structure the training-hour and experience requirements for your specific method-and-industry combination, and see whether their answer reflects real operational judgment or a generic template pulled from a boilerplate document.

Code Fluency: Know the Documents Your Level III Needs to Actually Use

A written practice doesn't exist in isolation — it has to align with the codes and specifications that govern the actual inspection work your company performs. A Level III who is going to develop or approve your written practice needs working fluency in the documents your technicians will be tested against and your customers will audit you to.

At minimum, that includes ASME Section V (the article-by-article source for NDE methods and acceptance requirements referenced by most construction codes), ASME BPVC Section VIII (pressure vessel design and fabrication, which invokes Section V), and ASME B31.3 (process piping — the code most fabrication and inspection work along the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor is built around). If your scope touches in-service inspection, your Level III also needs to understand how API 510 (pressure vessels), API 570 (piping), and API 653 (storage tanks) interact with NDT personnel qualification — even though those are separate API inspector certifications, not part of what an SNT-TC-1A written practice certifies.

It's also worth knowing that ISO 9712 is the international personnel certification scheme common outside the US and on multinational EPC projects, and that PCN (administered by BINDT) is the equivalent scheme used heavily in the UK and Europe. If your company bids international work, a Level III who understands how these schemes differ from SNT-TC-1A can flag scope gaps before they become a contract problem — though your written practice itself has no need to cover ISO 9712 or PCN, which are separate certification bodies with their own qualification pathways entirely outside SNT-TC-1A.

Ask candidates directly which editions of Section V, Section VIII, and B31.3 they've worked from most recently, and ask for an example of how they've resolved a conflict between a client specification and a base code requirement. The answer tells you more about real fluency than any certificate will.

Availability and Responsiveness: The Overlooked Deal-Breaker

A written practice is not a document you write once and file away. It needs revision when you add a method, change equipment, update to a newer code edition, or respond to an audit finding. Certification exams need to be administered on your schedule, not whenever a consultant has an opening three months out. A new hire who needs Level II certification before they can be deployed to a turnaround doesn't help you if your Level III takes six weeks to return an email.

Before you engage a Level III — in-house or outside consultant — get a straight answer on turnaround expectations. How quickly can they administer an exam when a technician is ready? What's their process for approving a written practice revision? Is there a retainer arrangement, or a one-time project with no defined path back to them six months from now? A consultant who treats the relationship as a one-time transaction and then goes dark is a liability the first time you need a fast turnaround before a project mobilizes.

Will They Actually Write It, or Just Sign It?

There's a meaningful difference between a Level III who sits down with your operations and quality leadership, understands your equipment, your methods, your workforce, and builds a written practice that genuinely reflects how your company operates — versus one who takes a document you drafted internally (or worse, a template pulled off the internet) and signs off on it with minimal review.

The second scenario is more common than it should be, and it's the one that falls apart during an audit. A code inspector or client auditor reviewing your NDT qualification program will ask questions a rubber-stamped document can't answer: why does this training-hour requirement exist, how was this exam question bank validated, why does this procedure diverge from the base SNT-TC-1A recommendation? If your Level III can't explain the reasoning because they didn't build it, you have a document with a signature but no substance behind it.

When vetting a candidate, ask them to describe their process for developing a written practice from scratch: do they conduct an on-site review of your current procedures and equipment, interview your Level II staff, review your existing certification records, and then build the document — or do they primarily review and approve something you hand them? Either can be legitimate depending on your starting point, but you should know which you're buying, and the price of a genuine development engagement should reflect real involvement, not a signature fee.

Documentation and Audit-Readiness

The real test of a written practice — and of the Level III behind it — comes when a customer's quality team, a third-party auditor, or an ASME/API code inspector shows up and asks to see the records. Can your program produce, for any currently certified technician, a complete file: initial qualification exam results, vision test records at the required interval, experience logs, training hour documentation, and a clear chain showing how each certification traces back to the current written practice?

A Level III worth engaging should be able to tell you, before you sign anything, how they structure records to survive that kind of scrutiny — and ideally should help you build or clean up your recordkeeping, not just the written practice document. Software matters here as much as the paper: a qualification program tracked in scattered spreadsheets is harder to audit cleanly than one managed through a system built for it, which is why NDT organizations increasingly pair written practice work with a platform like Atlantis NDT ERP, keeping technician certification records, training hours, and calibration data in one auditable system rather than reconstructed under pressure the week before a client audit.

Ask a candidate Level III directly: if a client audited our program next month, what would you expect them to ask for, and how would you help us be ready? A consultant with real audit experience will have a specific, detailed answer. One without it will speak in generalities.

Independence and Conflict of Interest

There's a structural tension worth naming plainly: a Level III who both writes your written practice and certifies the technicians under it, without any independent check, is grading their own work. That's not automatically a problem — plenty of legitimate, well-run programs operate exactly this way, especially at smaller companies where a single in-house Level III reasonably wears both hats. But it's worth being deliberate about, particularly if your certifications feed into contracts with clients who run their own vendor NDT audits.

For higher-stakes environments — nuclear-adjacent work, programs governed by CP-189, or strict vendor qualification audits — some companies bring in an outside Level III to independently review a written practice developed internally, or to administer exams independently of the person who trained the candidate. This isn't about distrust; it's about withstanding a skeptical auditor's question of "who checks the checker?" If your client base has this kind of scrutiny, ask a prospective Level III how they'd structure independence into the process, and whether they're comfortable being the independent reviewer rather than the sole author.

Questions to Ask Before You Engage a Level III

Use this as a working checklist when you're screening candidates, whether you're hiring in-house or bringing in outside ASNT Level III consulting:

• Are you certified under SNT-TC-1A (employer-based), ASNT 9712 (ASNT central certification), CP-189, or some combination — and can you provide documentation of scope, methods, and levels covered?
• Which methods (UT, RT, MT, PT, VT, ET, TOFD, PAUT) have you personally practiced at Level II or higher, in which industries, and for how long?
• Which editions of ASME Section V, Section VIII, and B31.3 have you worked from most recently, and can you give an example of resolving a code-versus-client-specification conflict?
• What is your process for developing a written practice — on-site review and interviews, or primarily reviewing a draft we provide?
• What is your typical turnaround for exam administration and for written practice revisions once we request them?
• Do you offer an ongoing retainer relationship, or is this a single, one-time engagement?
• Can you walk through how you'd structure documentation so it holds up under a client or code-inspector audit?
• If our client base requires independent review, are you willing to serve as an independent reviewer of an internally drafted practice rather than the sole author?
• Can you provide references from companies in a similar industry and method mix to ours?

A candidate who answers these questions specifically and without hesitation is showing you they've actually done this work before, in environments like yours. A candidate who gets vague on specifics is telling you something too.

Getting the written practice right is foundational, but it's one piece of a larger quality system. The training your Level II and Level III candidates receive needs to actually produce the competence the written practice assumes — which is why the same rigor you apply to vetting a Level III consultant should apply to your NDT training provider. And once technicians are certified, the records and inspection data they generate need a home that keeps everything traceable, whether that's NDT reporting software for day-to-day documentation or a digital twin platform for tying inspection history to specific asset locations over a facility's life.

A written practice built by someone who genuinely understands your methods, your codes, and your industry — and who stays engaged as your program evolves — is worth more than a signature on a template. Take the time to vet it properly; the certifications your company issues for years afterward depend on it.

Whether you handle this in-house or bring in outside expertise, Atlantis NDT's ASNT Level III consulting is built around the vetting criteria above — real method and industry experience, direct involvement in drafting and maintaining your written practice, and documentation that holds up when it's audited.

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