Your NDT Level III Just Resigned: The First 90 Days

Hour Zero: What Actually Changed the Moment the Resignation Took Effect

The instinct after a Level III resignation is to assume the program collapsed. It did not. Certification under an employer-based scheme is an act of the company, recorded in a document the company signed, and nothing about a departure reaches back to invalidate it. Your ultrasonic Level II certified last March is still certified. The procedure approved two years ago is still approved. Work in progress under those procedures and those personnel continues legitimately, and stopping it is the more expensive mistake.

What changed is narrower and sharper. SNT-TC-1A paragraph 5.5 requires the written practice to be reviewed and approved by the employer's NDT Level III. Section 8 requires in-house certification examination questions to be approved by the NDT Level III. Paragraph 8.1.1 constrains who may administer a certification examination. Every one of those sentences names a role that is now empty, so every activity that requires that role is suspended until it is filled.

There is one asymmetric detail worth understanding early. Section 13 of SNT-TC-1A deems certification revoked on termination of employment where the individual does not hold third-party certification. That clause applies to the person leaving. Their employer-based Level III certification with you ends. Any personal ASNT NDT Level III certificate they hold is theirs, travels with them, and was never yours to lose. Your obligation is to retain the records of what they approved while employed.

The Five Signatures You No Longer Have

It helps to convert the abstract loss of authority into a list of specific signatures the company can no longer produce. First, the written practice approval page: any revision now sits unsigned, including revisions triggered by adopting a newer edition of the referenced scheme. Second, certification records for anyone finishing qualification, which includes new hires, promotions from Level I to Level II, and method additions for existing staff.

Third, examination approval and grading. This covers question bank approval, examination version control, graded written papers and practical demonstration score sheets. Fourth, procedure and technique approval, covering both new procedures and revisions to existing ones, which is the signature most likely to stop revenue work at short notice because customers request procedure changes without regard for your staffing. Fifth, technical performance evaluation and periodic program audit records, which are the artefacts an auditor uses to judge whether the program was actually running.

List these five against your current pipeline in the first week. If there are three candidates mid-qualification, two procedure revisions in the customer queue and eight recertifications falling due within the quarter, you now know the shape of the gap and its deadline. Most companies discover the real urgency in the recertification column, because those dates were set years ago and nobody has looked at them since.

What Keeps Running, and Why Overreacting Costs More Than the Gap

Certified technicians keep inspecting. Approved procedures keep governing that inspection. Reports keep being issued and signed by the Level II who performed the work. Calibration schedules, equipment records and customer notifications are unaffected. None of this depends on the Level III post being occupied on any given day, and suspending work "until we sort the Level III out" creates a delivery failure that your customers will remember far longer than a documented ninety-day vacancy.

The clocks that keep running are the ones that catch people out. Recertification intervals under Section 12 do not pause. Interrupted service provisions under Section 11 apply to technicians who stop working in a method, and a work stoppage you impose can itself trigger them. Vision test anniversaries continue. Customer audit dates continue. Nothing about the departure slows any of those, so the calendar keeps advancing while the authority to act on it is missing.

This is the correct way to frame the urgency internally. The problem is not that the program is invalid today. The problem is that the program has a fixed number of days before a dated obligation arrives that nobody is authorised to discharge, and the earliest of those dates is your real deadline. Find that date in week one and work backwards from it rather than forwards from the resignation.

Days 0-7: Secure the Records Before the Laptop Is Reimaged

The single highest-value action in the first week has nothing to do with recruiting. It is taking custody of records. Examination question banks, examination masters and answer keys, graded papers, practical demonstration score sheets, procedure approval sheets, written practice source files, technical performance evaluation records, the personnel qualification register and the audit history. In small companies these live on one laptop, in one personal cloud folder, or in a filing cabinet only one person opened.

This matters because those records are the evidence supporting certifications you already issued and will still be defending three years from now. An auditor sampling a certification from two years ago asks for the graded examination behind it. "The Level III kept those and he left" is a finding against the certification, not against the individual. Recovering the material after IT has reimaged a machine and disabled an account ranges from expensive to impossible.

Handle it as a checklist item in the offboarding process, with a named owner and a completion date, and confirm the individual's own certification copies are on file with dates and expiry. In parallel, issue the interim designation. A single dated memorandum, signed by an officer, naming who holds approving authority pending permanent appointment, converts an invisible vacancy into a controlled transition. That memorandum is the cheapest audit evidence you will ever produce.

Days 8-30: Naming an Interim Approving Authority

You have three routes and they resolve on very different timescales. Contracting an outside Level III is the fastest, because a qualified individual with current certificates can review your written practice and begin approving procedures within days of engagement. The certifying signature still belongs to an officer of your company, so nothing about the boundary changes, but the technical authority is restored immediately. This is the only route that reliably closes a gap inside thirty days.

Promoting internally is the slowest. Under CP-189 the employer's Level III must hold a current ASNT NDT Level III certificate in the method, so promotion depends on your candidate passing the Basic examination plus at least one Method examination, which requires study time and scheduled examination sittings. ASNT publishes its examination fees per examination and requires candidates to meet defined education and experience routes, ranging from twelve months of documented experience with a relevant four-year degree to forty-eight months without one. Plan this as a succession programme, not as a gap fix.

Recruiting sits in between and carries a hidden dependency. A candidate with credentials in three of your five methods restores authority in three methods only. Before writing the job description, list every method your program certifies and every code your customers invoke, then treat that list as the specification. Many companies end up with a permanent contracted Level III for one or two low-volume methods alongside an employed Level III covering the rest.

Days 31-60: Rebuilding Approvals and Examination Material

Once authority is restored, work through the backlog in dependency order. The written practice comes first, because everything else derives from it. Have the incoming Level III review it as written, not as remembered, and sign the approval page with a current date. If the previous holder maintained undocumented interpretations, this is where they surface, and it is far better to surface them under your own review than under a customer's.

Procedures come second. Existing approvals stand, so this is not a re-approval exercise for the whole library. It is a triage: which procedures are due for periodic review, which reference a superseded code edition, and which the customer has already asked you to revise. Each of those needs the new Level III's signature with their method scope visible, and each approval sheet should show the transition clearly so an auditor can trace authority across the change without asking.

Examination material comes third and is often the most damaged. If question banks left with the individual, they must be rebuilt, and rebuilt properly rather than copied from a generic source. The new Level III approves the question set, documents version control, and records which version each future candidate sat. Where a candidate was examined during the gap on material with no traceable approval, re-examine rather than argue. It is cheaper than defending the record later.

Days 61-90: Converting Interim into Permanent

Ninety days is the point at which "we are between Level IIIs" stops functioning as an answer. Auditors accept transitions. They do not accept indefinite ones, because an indefinite transition means the company has decided to run without an approving authority and is describing that decision as temporary. Set an internal deadline to convert the interim designation into a documented permanent arrangement, whichever of the three routes you land on.

The conversion is a paperwork exercise if the earlier steps were done well. Revise the written practice to name the current approving Level III arrangement, including whether the role is employed or contracted, and re-issue the approval page. File the individual's current certificates with expiry dates. Update the personnel qualification register to show the certifying officer and the approving Level III as separate roles, which prevents the same confusion recurring at the next departure.

Then close the loop on continuity. Add a clause to the contract or the role description covering handover of records on exit, and store examination masters and qualification files inside your quality management system rather than on any individual's machine. The company that has been through one Level III resignation and changed nothing structurally will experience the identical ninety days again, with the same scramble, at a moment it chooses even less.

What the Next Audit Will Ask, In Order

Auditors approach a known transition in a predictable sequence, and knowing it lets you assemble the file in advance. First: who is your approving NDT Level III today, and show me the written designation. Second: show me their current certification for each method in scope, with expiry dates. Third: show me the written practice approval page and its date, which tells them whether the new authority has actually reviewed the governing document or merely inherited it.

Fourth: sample certifications issued during the transition period and ask for the qualification evidence behind each one, including graded examinations, experience records and vision tests. This is where records custody in week one pays for itself. Fifth: sample procedures revised during the period and check the approval signature against the approver's method scope, which is the most common place a rushed transition produces an out-of-scope approval nobody noticed.

Sixth, and only if the earlier answers were weak: the recertification register, looking for dates that fell due inside the gap and were never discharged. A company that can answer the first three questions in under ten minutes rarely reaches question six. A company that hesitates on question one will spend the rest of the audit on the consequences.

How Atlantis Covers the Gap

Atlantis provides outsourced ASNT Level III support built for exactly this trigger. We review and approve your written practice, approve NDT procedures and techniques within our certified methods, rebuild and approve examination banks, proctor and grade examinations, complete technical performance evaluations, and clear the recertification backlog that accumulated while the post sat empty. Engagements are affordable, accessible and fully customizable to your methods, your codes and the accreditation your customers require.

We do not sign your certification records, because no outside party can. Part of the engagement is establishing which officer in your company holds certifying signature authority and restructuring your certification template so the technical approval and the employer declaration are separate, visibly distinct signatures. Companies that fix this during a transition rarely have to think about it again, and the arrangement supports both an interim period and a permanent contracted role.

If your Level III has resigned, given notice, or is the single point of failure in a program you have not stress-tested, request a demo or a quote at /contact or email info@atlantisndt.com. Send the method list, the codes your customers invoke and the nearest recertification date, and we will tell you which obligations fall inside the gap and in what order they need to be discharged.

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