Louisiana leads with ISA certification

When you think of Louisiana, you might think of hot jazz and spicy food. But you might not think of a pioneer in engineering certification. Yet with over 25 plants on the Mississippi River, the state government and educational system realized the importance of training maintenance mechanics, and became not only initiators but premier users of ISA's Certified Industrial Maintenance Mechanic(TM) (CIMM(TM)) program.

"We're a technical college, and our school is located in the middle of a big industrial corridor. So we want to train people with the necessary skills to get a good job," said Dennis Murphy, Dean of the River Parishes campus of Louisiana Technical College Reserve and a key contributor to the beginnings of the certification program.

"We've found that certification makes a real difference in employees' morale and their ability to accomplish a task," said Rod Lincoln, Manager of Organizational Development and Training at Cytec, in New Orleans, La., and National Chairperson of the CIMM Development Committee.

"With CIMM, we know certified mechanics have had their knowledge validated on a national basis. They become more confident in their abilities, seek greater challenges, and work to become even more competent than they were originally," he said. "Certification makes good business sense for companies and individuals."

Murphy said certification is important especially among refrigeration, welding, and drafting maintenance mechanics because such certification didn't exist before, and competition is getting tough. "At our campus we have an industrial maintenance program. It's a two-year multi-crafted program where students learn welding, electrical, air conditioning, refrigeration, and mechanical skills," he said. "At the end of two years they usually get jobs in plants." Murphy said his team was looking for a national certification program for industrial maintenance. And they found it in collaboration with ISA.

While there were quite a few certification programs through the Chemical Association and Auto Association, there were none for maintenance mechanics, Murphy said. The State also instituted the mechanical incumbent worker program, a two-year program developed through the Department of Labor. "And ISA had certification for instrumentation people but none available for mechanical people," he said. "So we started having meetings in 2002 on a regular basis to get plant people to buy in to how important it is to have certification for maintenance mechanics."

The biggest benefit for the mechanics passing the certification is they could "walk into any plant and have their credentials recognized nationally," Murphy said. "It's the same with automotive certification. ISA is already nationally recognized throughout the country with instrumentation and electrical certification. We wanted to model our program after what they were already doing."

But getting the word out will be the challenge, Murphy said. "We just got the Louisiana Chemical Association to recognize the certification, so the goal now is to get the publicity out." The Louisiana Workforce Commission will "make sure we have certifications in all our higher education levels. And with technical and community colleges, our task in Louisiana is to get as much certification as we can to get great jobs."

STATE BENEFITS

The biggest benefit for the Louisiana Technical College Reserve is national recognition, Murphy said. "We recognize a lot of schools throughout the country, and we know how important certifications are when students finish. They can't get a certification unless they have so many years of experience."

Chris Weaver, Executive Director of the Louisiana Workforce Commission in Baton Rouge agrees. CIMM is particularly important for Louisiana, Weaver said, since "part of the reason it was developed here was because of the chemical industry and related industry plants along the river," she said. "Employers saw the need to work together and have something that was uniform between companies and plants." The certification is "important in our areas because for each of our industry-based certifications on our focus list, we have an employer sponsor for that," she said. "In many cases our employer sponsor is the trade association of that industry in the state. The workforce commission is employer-lead and employerfocused. We're trying to promote the idea with certifications that these portable credentials exist and they're of benefit to the employer and the worker."

UNION BENEFITS

The CIMM program also makes sense for union workers, giving them the chance to get in on the ground floor and have control of their own destinies. "We fight a lot of issues about contracting and outsourcing our jobs," said Brent Petit, President of United Steel Workers (USW) Local - 4-447. "We feel like it's a possibility that OSHA may mandate mechanic certification in the future. So to get ahead of that process, we thought it would be a good idea for the union to be involved [with the CIMM development] so we'd have input."

Petit said he helped decide what level the CIMM process would determine. The best part, Petit said, was the industrial mechanic certification was developed from a wide range of expertise. "We had people from the chemical industry, oil industry, breweries, garbage incineration," he said. So that kind of diversity meant certification will be based, not on specific machinery, but on the basics, "the knowledge it takes to fix the machinery, such as how you change a bearing," he said. "When you get more specific it gets too hard to bring in all the industries. If you want a program that'll fit in all industries, it has to be a wide breadth of knowledge. You need to make sure people know how to change a bearing, line a shaft, then make sure they know how to read the prints, or manuals," he said.

EMPLOYER BENEFITS

The Louisiana Chemical Association, American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, Marathon, Shell, pulp and paper industries - all will be affected by the new certification program. "Efficiency is the name of the game, and we're competing worldwide," Murphy said. "It used to be just within the state. Now you have to have an efficient workforce to keep plants running 24 hours a day, you have to produce at top level constantly to make profits. With raw materials and labor involved in production of products, it's important to have people in our plant who are all certified and can understand content and problems with operations," he said. "This certification recognizes content; but it also recognizes experience. Then you also have to renew that certification," he said. "So you'll get a good workforce that's competent. And you're willing to pay more money."

Employers will buy in, Weaver believes, because "they'll have confidence in credentials they helped design and validate. We believe, in the case of the CIMM program, where employers recognize the need to have a standard for credentials, they will recognize when someone comes in with that credential, they'll know the content and the standard of the training that person received, and the standards they've met to receive the certifications."

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