Maintenance Mindset: 5 reliability and maintenance certifications you need to know about
Welcome to Maintenance Mindset, our editors’ takes on things going on in the worlds of manufacturing and asset management that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site.
This week I'm in Austin TX covering the Fluke Xcelerate event, which has evolved from its orignal identity as eMaint user-group meeting into a three-day thought leadership conference. The Xcelerate event now focuses as much on reliability and predictive maintenance as it does on how CMMS software can power these initiatives.
The first day of the event was Thought Leadership Day during which a group of about 120 executives, industrial leaders, and media professionals gathered to discuss the top challeges facing our industry — labor gaps, evolving markets, geopolitical uncertainty, new regulations, sustainability requirements, the pace of technological change — and to explore the various paths forward. The day included three breakout sessions where small groups of 10 would explore a single issue in depth, and in one of those sessions a surprising revelation came to light.
The topic was the state of apprenticeship programs in manufacturing, and an asset management executive sitting at the table revealed that they had been asked to develop a global appprenticeship program for their 10+ plants, but with an odd condition — the program could not include any professional certifications. This condition had been requested by senior leadership apparently out of concern that both trained and certified apprentices would be more marketable, and therefore a greater risk to leave the company for higher pay elsewhere.
I'll be honest, this statement completely floored me. (The executive made it clear to me that this condition was not their idea or their preference.) What is the point of an apprenticeship program if not to nuture and develop talent in the skilled trades? And it's not as if the apprenticeship itself is without marketable value, so why draw the line at certifications? Finally, how much will an apprentice's confidence in a company be shaken if/when they learn that the company held back on this kind of professional investment?
In a way I shouldn't have been so shocked. Last October at the RPM Symposium, I gave a presentation on ways that industrial maintenance has changed over the past 10 years that included a slide on key certifications in reliability and maintenance. It was one slide of 40, but it was the only slide that attendees mentioned as they came up to me afterwards wanting to know more.
What was on that slide? It was a simple list of five common certifications in the reliability space, and people who were asking me about them were Millennial / GenZ workers who were learning about this side of our industry for the first time. Until then, I had considered certifications like the CMRP common knowledge among our industry. Consider me surprised both then and now.
I sincerely hope that the apprentices in the program mentioned above find a way to learn about and then earn any certifications they want to pursue. And to support the greater good and help get the word out to any worker in our field who needs to know about certifications, here is the list of five from my October presentation plus links to their respective websites and a short description of each from those websites. (There are of course more certifications available, especially in specialty areas like vibration analysis, but these five are a good starting place for those seeking generalist certification in maintenance and reliability.)
CMRP — the Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP) program is the only certification program of its kind accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which follows the globally-recognized ISO standards for its accreditation purposes. The test is a thorough examination of a broad scope of expertise measured against the universal standard. It was developed to assess professionals’ aptitude within the five pillars of the SMRP Body of Knowledge (BoK), which include: Business & Management, Equipment Reliability, Manufacturing Process Reliability, Organization & Leadership, and Work Management.
CRE — a Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE) is a professional who specializes in improving the reliability, maintainability, and safety of products, systems, and processes. This certification program is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) under the ISO 17024 standard, demonstrating impartial, third-party validation that the certification program has met recognized national and international credentialing industry standards for a program’s development, implementation, and maintenance.
CRL — the Certified Reliability Leader® (CRL) certification exam was created to validate the competencies of a professional in an organization as a reliability leader. The professional must master the language, words, phrases, ideas, concepts, and foundational knowledge required to engage and empower all stakeholders in an organization as a reliability leader.
RMIC — the Reliability & Maintainability Implementation Certification (RMIC®) program provides the basic foundation of R&M knowledge and offers the flexibility to include the specific training that you need. The RMC has designed the program for working professionals and gives the most hands-on and practical maintenance and reliability education. It is a College of Engineering Guided Professional Development Program.
CAMA — the Certified Asset Management Assessor (CAMA) exam and associated CAMA certification has been developed and is offered by the World Partners in Asset Management, a partnership of non-profit professional associations including the Asset Management Council (Australia), ABRAMAN (Brazil), Gulf Society for Maintenance & Reliability (Gulf Region), JAAM (Japan), SAAMA (Southern Africa) and PEMAC (Canada). The goal of the CAMA certification process is to help individuals who are interested in serving as asset management assessors to demonstrate they have the necessary asset management knowledge and experience, as well as knowledge of ISO 5500x, to serve as part of an ISO 5500x certification-of-organizations process.
