Safety Professional Certificate
If you work in OHS, you know how important it is to be well-trained. A Safety Professional Certificate, or SPC, offers a credential for these professionals and a comprehensive education covering a veritable A-Z in safety, everything from audits to techniques for avoiding workplace violence. This kind of certificate is essential for OHS leaders and anyone looking to further their career in safety and health.
The 25-course program and certificate from the National Association of Safety Professionals (NASP) allows professionals to demonstrate their skills with the highest training designation offered. Regardless of industry, this certificate program is an excellent way to create a culture of safety at your workplace and improve your understanding of safety and health. The program allows you to attain the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to perform as an effective safety professional.
What Is a Safety Professional Certificate?
The NASP SPC is a comprehensive program covering a broad range of safety topics. It helps OHS professionals improve safety in their companies and better comply with OSHA standards. Once they complete the program, individuals can guide safe practices throughout their organizations with their robust background knowledge.
These professionals might help their businesses to:
- Conduct audits and inspections.
- Investigate, analyze, and document workplace incidents and root cause analyses.
- Avoid civil and criminal liability for workplace injuries and accidents.
- Manage hazardous materials.
- Develop sound techniques for safe equipment operation and general workplace behaviors.
- Determine appropriate application and interpretation of OSHA standards and regulations.
- Create strong and effective training practices for safe workplace processes.
- Model picture-perfect safety habits, behaviors, and attitudes.
- Understand and apply requirements for guidelines and regulations from OSHA, EPA, and DOT.
Who Needs a Safety Professional Certificate?
Anyone in charge of OHS work can benefit from the valuable information within a safety professional course. Each task listed above is best performed by a well-trained, third-party-certified expert in safety and health, making someone who has earned the certificate a valuable asset to any commercial or industrial facility. You’re always learning, but proving you have the experience and knowledge required is the best way to advance your career, whether you’re just starting out as a safety professional or you’re ready to move to the next level.
Even if you’re not interested in all the courses included in the SPC, it is important to obtain a comprehensive overview of the safety profession. The extensive SPC is a more efficient and affordable way to become certified in a wide variety of subjects.
How to Earn a Safety Professional Certificate
Earning an SPC entails taking a comprehensive course covering different topics.
Our stand-alone program meets the requirements for all certificates below it, such as those related to fire prevention and hazard communication, which function as building blocks for the course. There are 25 areas of specialization, and you complete the levels step-by-step so each one prepares you for the next step. The result is numerous abilities that directly relate to your daily on-site duties.
During the certificate program, you learn at your own pace, and you have six months to complete the online courses. Students finish this course in about 242 hours on average and will receive 24.2 CEUs that can be transferred to academic credits through our Partners at Columbia Southern University. To pass, you must earn at least 80% on the final exams at the end of each specialist course. You can attempt each exam twice. While the exams aren’t timed, you must complete each in one session, so be sure to give yourself plenty of time since leaving early will count as a failed attempt. After five to 10 business days, we’ll mail your certificate.
Renewing Your Safety Professional Certificate
You’ll need to take a refresher course and exam every three years to maintain the certificate. Renewing your NASP SPC certificate is easy. Simply log in to your dashboard, find your expired certificate, and select Renew. You’ll gain access to all your course materials so you can review them as needed before sitting for the renewal exam. As with taking the exam the first time, you’ll have two chances to pass with at least an 80%.
After you complete the renewal exam, we’ll issue you a new certificate. Note that Continuing Education Units (CEUs) are not available for the renewal course since you can move quickly from module to module without viewing all the training materials. Be sure to stay on top of renewing your certificate — you’ll need to retake the complete course if your certificate has been expired for one year or more.
Benefits of a Safety Professional Certificate
An SPC offers many benefits for the certificate holder and the organization they work for. These benefits include:
- OSHA compliance: More safety education means better adherence to OSHA regulations and fewer fines or noncompliance incidents. An SPC can provide the education necessary for meeting complicated regulations and understanding the complex jargon that goes with them. We’ll break down this jargon and go into detail on what it means for your workers. When evaluating a company, OSHA and other agencies tend to view your certificates as supporting your understanding of the regulations, so having them on your side looks much better to them.
- Practical knowledge and skills: The information learned through an SPC can provide you with skills that have significant, real-world effects on the safety of your employees. You can enact lifesaving practices that support everyone in your facility and improve peace of mind across the board. Plus, your employer will likely benefit from reduced costs due to workers’ compensation claims and downtime due to injury or equipment damage.
- Career advancements: Completing this certificate program shows you can enact big organizational changes, like company-wide initiatives and safety programs. It puts you in a position to lead and take on supervisor roles while preparing you for upper-level management work. A certificate provides a more standardized way for a hiring team to know right away you’re qualified for the job — and likely, a higher salary. One survey found professionals with two ore more certificates earned over $25,000 more annually than those with no certificates.
- Professional development: An SPC shows you’re willing to go the extra mile and spend time on continuing education. You can both improve yourself and show your dedication to your team through the additional expertise and commitment to safety that comes with the certificate.
- Training capabilities: One of the primary responsibilities of an OHS officer is to train other employees in effective safety practices and emergency procedures. Our SPC coursework provides extensive education on these topics, so you’re in an excellent position to offer training that empowers employees and keeps them safe.
- Third-party verification: Verification from a trusted third-party organization tells others you’ve met objective standards of training. NASP offers 24.2 CEUs on successful completion of the SPC course, which you may apply toward other certification requirements, such as those of the BCSP (Board of Certified Safety Professionals).
Topics Covered in Our Safety Professional Certificate Course
Let’s talk about what you can do with a Safety Professional Certificate from NASP. It covers an exhaustive list of courses and their respective areas of concentration certificates, which include the following:
- General Industry
- Training Methodology Specialist (TMS)
- Behavior-Based Safety Specialist (BBS)
- Job Hazard Analysis Specialist (JHA)
- Incident Investigation Specialist (IIS)
- Emergency Management Specialist (SEM)
- HAZWOPER Specialist (HZS)
- Hazard Communication Specialist (HCS)
- Environmental Specialist (ENS)
- Lockout Tagout Specialist (LTS)
- Trenching and Excavation Specialist (TES)
- Confined Space Entry Specialist (CSS)
- Personal Protective Equipment Specialist (PES)
- Fire Prevention Specialist (FPS)
- Electrical Safety Specialist (ESS)
- Machine Guarding Specialist (MGS)
- Walking-Working Surfaces and Fall Protection Specialist (WWS)
- Workplace Ergonomics Specialist (WES)
- Workplace Violence Prevention Specialist (VPS)
- OSHA Recordkeeping Specialist (ORS)
- Bloodborne Pathogens and First Aid Treatment Specialist (BPS)
From fall protection and ergonomics to bloodborne pathogens and recordkeeping, the SPC courses run the gamut. It will prepare you for a career in even the most complex and risky environments and give you the confidence to handle incidents appropriately and efficiently.
Purchase NASP’s Certified Safety Professional Certificate Course Online
You must be dedicated to earn an SPC, but it can have a significant and positive impact on your career and workplace. Our safety professional certificate program teaches you how to keep people safe and ensure compliance with OSHA and other standards. The certificate proves to others you know your stuff, especially when your training comes from the trusted educators at NASP.
Our courses meet or exceed OSHA requirements and ANSI/ASSP Z490.2 requirement for online courses. Additionally, our innovative training methods emphasize dynamic, interactive instruction to stimulate students and improve knowledge retention.
Whether you’re looking to dive right in or you already have some experience, such as a Certified Safety Manager (CSM) or a Safety Director Certificate (SDC), we can help. All courses are available in our online portal and were created by safety professionals for safety professionals.
Sign up today to start your journey to attaining your NASP Safety Professional Certificate!