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Newsletter March 2008

So You Think You Know NICET

Today's topic is verification of work elements. Let's start off with a short quiz.

  1. Work elements must be verified in order to test on them. (T / F)
  2. Verifiers must be NICET certified. (T / F)
  3. Verifiers can be relatives providing they meet the requirements for verifiers. (T / F)
  4. Verifiers and recommenders are interchangeable. (T / F)
  5. No more than one verifier can verify elements on the same application. (T / F)
  6. Verification of work elements is an administrative hoop to jump through that has no real value to the applicant. (T / F)


We will start from the bottom and work our way back up. Please understand that Work Element Verification is a process by which NICET acquires the immediate supervisor's affirmation of an applicant's on-the-job performance. By initialing each work element, they are officially attesting to having personally monitored the applicant's repeated and competent completion of the tasks or application of the knowledge associated with each work element, under a variety of conditions. NICET takes the role of the verifier very seriously as we depend on their integrity, professionalism, and ethics to supplement our efforts to ensure that we award certification to only those technicians meeting our benchmark standards. Consistent with NICET's Code of Ethics and Policies 1 and 2, inappropriate verification of work elements may result in the temporary suspension or permanent revocation of all NICET certifications the applicant and the verifier currently hold. Statements on the applications that the applicant and verifier sign make this clear.

When an applicant is testing on elements in multiple subfields, they may need more than one person to verify work elements due to the individual qualifications of the verifiers. For example a technician may perform sprinkler systems plan preparation under the supervision of a design manager and the same technician may perform inspections and maintenance on water-based systems under the supervision of the service manager. In this case the service manager may not have sufficient technical knowledge of plan preparations to verify elements from the Automatic Sprinkler Systems Layout program so those elements would need to be verified by the design manager. The applicant in this case would list all the work elements on Part IV of the application and each verifier would initial the applicable work elements and each would fill out Part III of the application so we can clearly identify them.

Recommendation forms are required for certification to Levels III and IV in our work elements programs. A person cannot be both a recommender and a verifier for an applicant. A person may be a verifier for one person and a recommender for another but cannot be both for the same person.

Verifiers can and often are relatives of applicants, providing they meet the technical and administrative requirements for verifiers. And while verifiers are often NICET certified they are not required to be so. The verifier must have been in a position to be responsible for the conduct or results of an applicant's work or their approval has been required for the products or results of their work. Ideally, this should be the applicant's immediate supervisor but due to a variety of reasons this may not be the case. If it is not the case, the working relationship between the applicant and verifier must be clearly and honestly represented in the space provided in Part III of the application.

Verification of work elements on an application are not required to test but are required for certification. For any number of reasons applicants may find themselves unable to get their work elements verified before submitting their application. In this situation they need to simply omit part III of the application when submitting their application and leave the verifier's initial blocks blank on Part IV of the application. As time and circumstances permit, the applicant submits part III and resubmits part IV of the application completely filled out. These parts of the application should be sent with a brief cover letter to our street address to the attention of "CDL Response".

For those of you who skipped over the intervening paragraphs between the quiz and this point looking for the answers to the quiz they are as follows:

    1. - F
    2. - F
    3. - T
    4. - F
    5. - F
    6. - F


So do you know NICET?