Hours, Examinations and the Written Practice Behind Them

Employer-based certification: what the recommended practice actually is

SNT-TC-1A is a recommended practice, not a standard, and it says so in its own title and scope. It offers guidelines an employer may adopt, adapt or decline. That sounds permissive until you follow the consequence: once your written practice adopts it, its guidelines become your obligations. The document's should language converts to shall the moment you cite it, because you are now being audited against your own stated practice rather than against ASNT's suggestions.

The certification itself is an act of the employer. Your company verifies training, verifies experience, administers general, specific and practical examinations, and issues a certificate under the signature of a certifying Level III. ASNT publishes the recommended practice and runs its own Level III examination programme, but it does not certify your Level I and Level II technicians and never has. A technician who says they are ASNT certified at Level II is describing something that does not exist in the way they mean it.

This is why the written practice is the whole game. A file full of impeccable certificates issued under a vague, unapproved or outdated written practice is worth less at audit than an ordinary file issued under a precise one. The certificates are conclusions. The written practice is the argument.

What the written practice must state, clause by clause

At minimum the document must name the edition of the recommended practice it is written to, define the certification levels and the responsibilities of each, set out education, training and experience requirements method by method and level by level, identify the training outlines used, describe how examinations are composed, administered and graded, name the certifying Level III and describe how that function is filled if the individual leaves, state recertification intervals, define interrupted service and its remedy, state vision requirements and their intervals, and describe the content and retention period of personnel records.

The edition matters more than most companies expect. The code of construction your work falls under fixes which editions of the recommended practice are acceptable, and ASME Section V routes personnel qualification through the employer's written practice on that basis. A written practice citing a newer edition than the code of record recognises is still a finding, which surprises people who assume newer is safer. The correct move is to check the code of record first and write the practice to match.

The other frequently missing clause is the modification clause. The recommended practice permits an employer to depart from its guidelines, but the departure has to be stated and approved, not simply practised. In audit terms there is a world of difference between a written practice that says this employer requires 24 hours rather than 40 for a stated reason approved by the Level III, and a training record that quietly shows 24 hours against a practice claiming to require 40.

Training hours and experience hours are not the same currency

Training hours are organised instruction against a documented topical outline, delivered by someone qualified to deliver it, with content, dates and attendance recorded. Most employers adopt the published ASNT topical outlines because writing your own and defending it at audit is more work than it looks. What training hours are not is time spent reading in a truck between jobs, or a vendor product demonstration, or a toolbox talk, and files that count those things are files that will be reduced.

Experience hours are hours performing or observing the method on production or representative work, documented by task and date, and accrued under the supervision the written practice defines. The failure mode here is reconstruction. A technician who logs hours as they are worked keeps them all. A technician who reconstructs eighteen months of a logbook from memory before an examination invariably loses hours they genuinely earned, because the roster does not support the entries and the auditor believes the roster.

There is one cross-check that catches more files than any other: comparing the training dates against the job roster. Forty hours of classroom training logged for a week the technician was signed onto a night shift on another site does not merely lose those forty hours. It puts every other entry in the file into question, and it usually ends with the certification being withdrawn and re-issued rather than defended.

The examinations, and how they are graded

Certification at Level I and Level II rests on three examinations. The general examination covers the principles and theory of the method and is closed book. The specific examination covers the employer's equipment, procedures, techniques and the codes and specifications the employer works to, which is exactly why it cannot be purchased ready-made and why two contractors on the same street have legitimately different specific examinations. The practical examination is a demonstration on representative specimens against a written instruction.

The usual grading rule is a minimum of 80 percent on each examination with a composite of at least 80 percent, weighted as the written practice defines. Level III certification is structured differently, with a basic examination, a method examination and an employer-specific examination covering the written practice, the applicable codes and the ability to prepare procedures. ISO 9712 grades part by part rather than allowing a strong written score to rescue a weak practical, and it makes the practical the centre of gravity of the whole examination.

The practical is where most candidates actually fail, and the reason is rarely knowledge. Examiners score checkpoints: instrument and accessory verification, calibration performed in the sequence the instruction specifies, calibration re-verified at the stated interval, settings recorded, indications located in a way another technician could find, report legible and signed. Candidates who find every flaw and hand in an unrepeatable record still fail, because an unrepeatable record is the thing the certification exists to prevent.

Vision, recertification and interrupted service

Near vision acuity must be verified annually, commonly as Jaeger Number 1 at not less than twelve inches in at least one eye, corrected or uncorrected, with colour contrast differentiation verified at the interval the written practice states. This is the single most commonly failed item in a contractor personnel file audit, and it is entirely administrative. An otherwise perfect certification with a vision record eleven days out of date is not a technicality at a refinery gate; it is a technician sent home.

Recertification intervals are set by the written practice within the recommended maximum, which current editions place at five years, although a great many employers keep shorter intervals for Levels I and II by choice. Recertification may be by examination, by evidence of continuing satisfactory performance, or by a combination, and the written practice has to say which and under what conditions. A practice that says recertification will be performed periodically has said nothing an auditor can accept.

Interrupted service is the clause most often missing entirely. The practice must define what constitutes a significant interruption and what happens afterwards, normally re-examination before the technician performs work. This matters acutely in a turnaround market where technicians work intensively for a season and then not at all. Under ISO 9712 the same concern appears in the renewal rules, which depend on evidence of continued activity without significant interruption in the method.

When SNT-TC-1A is not the applicable document

ANSI/ASNT CP-189 is a standard rather than a recommended practice, and it is written in mandatory language. Where a client or a specification invokes it, the latitude to modify requirements largely disappears, and it imposes conditions on the qualification of the certifying Level III that a home-grown arrangement may not satisfy. Companies that have run comfortably under an adapted SNT-TC-1A practice for years sometimes discover on a single contract that the invoked document is CP-189 and their practice does not meet it.

NAS 410 governs aerospace, and it has its own training and experience tables, its own examination structure and its own rules on the Level 3 responsible for certification. Work destined for aerospace supply chains, including the accreditation audits that follow, is judged against that document rather than against a general industrial practice. A Beaumont fabricator picking up aerospace or defence work discovers this at the audit rather than at the quotation.

ISO 9712 is the central certification route: an independent body examines and certifies the individual, and the certificate travels with them between employers. It is the expectation on much international work, and it is why some technicians in this market hold both an employer certification for domestic plant work and an ISO 9712 certificate for anything crossing a border.

How the requirement is enforced in Beaumont

The Beaumont and Port Arthur corridor along the Sabine-Neches Waterway concentrates refining, petrochemical, LNG and terminal capacity, and with it a dense population of inspection contractors serving owner-operators who audit. The enforcement mechanism is not a regulator arriving unannounced. It is contractor prequalification: an owner's contractor management process pulls personnel files before a turnaround mobilisation, samples them, and either clears the crew or does not.

What gets sampled is predictable. Vision records and their dates. Training records with outlines and instructors attached. Experience logs reconciled against the roster. The written practice itself, checked for the edition it cites and whether the certifying Level III named in it is still with the company. Certificates checked for whether the issuing employer is the employer presenting the technician. A crew that has never assembled this material until the week before mobilisation will not assemble it correctly that week.

The commercial consequence lands hardest during turnaround season, when crews are booked, accommodation is paid for and the unit comes off on a fixed date. A finding at prequalification does not simply delay one technician. It puts the contractor's whole roster under a closer look, which is why the companies that hold long-term positions on these sites tend to run their personnel files as though an audit is imminent rather than as though one is unlikely.

The sectors here that impose the requirement, and how they differ

Refining and petrochemical work brings ASME construction codes and the in-service inspection regime that follows, and it routes personnel qualification through the employer's written practice. Fabrication shops working structural steel to AWS D1.1 face a different demand: the code has its own expectations of who may perform ultrasonic examination, and the acceptance criteria are the code's own decibel-rating rules rather than an ASME reference-level comparison. A technician qualified for one is not automatically useful on the other.

Pipeline and LNG construction adds API 1104, with its own acceptance criteria and its own qualification expectations for the personnel performing and interpreting the examination. Marine and barge repair along the waterway brings class society requirements into the same market. Each of these clients can and does specify which qualification document governs, and a contractor working across all of them needs a written practice that acknowledges the differences rather than one that assumes ASME everywhere.

For an owner or QA manager building a programme here, the practical starting point is a list of the specifications your clients actually invoke, followed by an honest reading of whether your written practice satisfies the most demanding of them. That exercise reliably finds two or three gaps, and it is far cheaper to find them at a desk than at a gate. Atlantis NDT supports that work through ASNT Level III consulting and method training; contact info@atlantisndt.com for a consultation or a training quote.

Recovering a programme that has already been written up

The recovery sequence is the same almost every time. Revise the written practice first, because everything else is judged against it: name the edition, state every deviation explicitly, define supervision, interrupted service and recertification, and have the certifying Level III approve and date it. Nothing downstream can be fixed while the controlling document is still vague.

Then reconstruct the files in the right order. Vision records current for every technician. Training records with outlines, instructor and dated attendance. Experience logs reconciled against the roster, with entries that cannot be supported removed rather than defended. Examination records with the graded papers and practical checkpoint sheets retained, not just the scores. Certificates re-issued where the original issuance cannot be supported.

Finally, close the loop that caused the finding. In most cases it was not ignorance but sequence: the paperwork was treated as something produced for audits rather than something produced as work happens. Programmes that hold up are the ones where the log entry is made the same week as the work, and where a single named person owns the file rather than the technician owning their own.

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