The NFPA Wind Technician Certification Standardizes Wind Safety

Dan Pickel joins the Uptime Spotlight today to discuss the NFPA's
Wind Turbine Technician I certification program. The program allows
technicians to gain standardized recognition for their skills and
understanding of safety protocols. With NFPA's extensive background
in fire and electrical safety training, the course covers the
topics wind turbine technicians need to know and can be taken
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: We have a distinguished guest who is at the forefront of
developing professional standards in the rapidly growing wind
energy sector. Dan Pickel is the Director of Certification and
Accreditation at the National Fire Protection Association. Today,
Dan will be discussing NFPA's groundbreaking Wind Turbine
Technician I certification program. Which addresses the critical
need for qualified technicians in our rapidly expanding wind energy
sector. With projections showing a demand for over 500, 000
technicians globally by 2027, this certification program couldn't
come at a more crucial time. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining
light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress
powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the program. Dan Pickel:
Thanks for having me. I'm really appreciative to be here today.
Allen Hall: It's great to have you because there's so many
questions about this new certification and we decided to just go to
the expert and find out. So, you know, obviously the wind energy
sector is growing at a tremendous rate. And with that comes issues
about finding qualified technicians, and the new certification
program is trying to address that, correct? Dan Pickel: Yeah, so
we, we developed the certification program, and I know we'll get
into the, the meat of it later on, but it was meant to address that
issue where there are, there's a lack of, uh, knowledge and skills
for individuals that are entering the, uh, the industry as a wind
turbine technician. Joel Saxum: Yeah. You see, you hear that from a
lot of service providers, right? Rather it's blade repair, torque
and tensioning construction. We're at the point in the industry
where we're, we're, we're starting to just, I know this is for lack
of a better term, but like grabbing warm bodies and training them
up as fast as we can and throwing them out there. Well, what, what
that ends up doing is it kind of shoots us in the footlong run
because you end up with cost of port quality issues, you know,
other, other safety issues and things on site, let alone the
technical knowledge. Yeah. Uh, that's needed to advance the, the
wind sector here, especially in the United States. Dan Pickel:
Yeah, definitely. I think there's, we've spoken to, uh, some of
NFPA's customers in the past and their push is to get people to
right trading. They want to make sure that their new employees have
all the tools they need to be successful and to be safe out in the
field. And they were struggling because there are some other
training options out there. Um, they reached out to us about
getting 70E training for electrical safety, but they were finding
that wasn't enough. There were still some issues on the field. They
were telling us about some really unsafe conditions that were
Caused by people just being unskilled and, and not knowledgeable in
terms of what they should be doing. So that was when we really
started to dig into the idea of developing a certification for
entry-level wind turbine technicians, which is what we ended up
doing. Allen Hall: So that lack of a. standardized approach or some
sort of label that's applied to technicians, like they're qualified
to be here, that really affects two ends of it. It affects the
company that is hiring them, but it also affects a technician that
is competent because they kind of get grouped into the larger pool
where there's sort of a mixed bag of, of technician qualifications.
Dan Pickel: Yeah. And that's, that's where certification. Can
really be a game changer for individuals. So if you look at two
different candidates for the same job, um, you know, same
education, same training, same experience, but one of them
certified, I think what that shows is that there is a, um, that
person invested in themselves. So they apply for the program. They
take the job. You know, took whatever training they needed to, they
studied for the exam, then they passed it. And certification exams
are meant to be pretty rigorous, so it's, they're developed by
subject matter experts related to the actual job role. So if you
look at those two individuals, they will, who should I, should I
hire? Most employers are going to go with the person that invested
themselves because that's a, you know, a predictor of success.
Allen Hall: So let's, let's break this down a Program is relatively
new. I think I first heard about it this summer. And what from the
industry drove you? Was it just an industry consensus? Was it, uh,
industry resource groups that were saying, Hey, NFPA, you do a lot
of certifications. You're the leading body, particularly United
States, for this. We need you to develop something. Or how did this
really come about? Dan Pickel: I get emails and calls all the time
from people with ideas for certification saying this person or this
group of people don't know what they're doing. We need a
certification. So at that point, we look into the business case.
It's what's what's the industry? What's the role maturity? You
know, um, do we have any connection to that industry? As well,
because NFPA works with fire life and electrical safety hazards, is
this something that makes sense for us? In a lot of cases, it
doesn't. When we're looking at the wind turbine technician role,
uh, there's a lot of, you know, electrical issues, um, electrical
shock issues that we are hearing about. Um, there's some fall
safety, there's PPE issues, there's hydraulics and mechanical
systems and, and a lot of those align with what NFPA does, its
mission. So we looked at that and we thought, this makes sense. Is
the role mature enough? And from what we could find, it was. So we
talked with subject matter experts about this, and ultimately we
invited people to, to join our certification advisor group. Now
that's a group of subject matter experts. They're primarily based
in the US, but, uh, several of them were based abroad. And, you
know, we, we met with them to talk about what, what does this thing
look like in terms of role? So we had a role delineation to
determine what is exactly done by people that perform. And that
involves a pretty robust job task analysis and a number of other
steps to come to a, uh, you know, formalized exam blueprint, which
is the basis for the exam. Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Okay. So who were
some of the participants in this? And obviously a lot of the wind
turbine, uh, Operators, and obviously the manufacturers, are not
based in the U. S., so there must have been a lot of differing
inputs into that advisory group. Dan Pickel: Yeah. So we have a, we
have a, uh, a program overview that lists all of our, uh, CAG
members, or the Certification Advisory Group members. Some came
from GE, some came from Vestas. A lot of them had been working in
the U. S., but then also worked abroad, and they traveled a bunch,
so, and they'd worked at different companies, so they were, you
pretty knowledgeable about what the different, uh, you know,
manufacturers were doing, what the different installers were doing,
and what, what maintenance companies were doing as well. So we, we
were really, we benefited from their expertise quite a bit when
developing the certification program. Allen Hall: Oh, that's
interesting. And the assessment that is performed to really
determine competency, there are, from what I can see from the
website, and if you haven't visited the NFPA website, you should
visit it and just put in wind turbine technician and it'll pop
right up to the page. Wonderful site. There's a lot of good
information there. There are really four general areas that the
comprehensive assessment is looking into. Uh, mechanical systems,
hydraulic systems, electrical systems, and then sort of working at
heights in general safety. But when you look at the distribution
here, there's a lot about general safety, which is a little
alarming. We should have that locked in already. Dan Pickel: We
should, yeah. So the way that it works is, so we, we work with our
subject matter experts. We come up with this job task analysis. So
it's, what are all the behavioral things? What are the tasks that
someone needs to perform to be competent in a role? Okay. Thank
you. So they put this list together and then what we do is we've
sent it out as a validation survey to anyone that's in the wind
industry that works as a wind turbine technician. And they answered
two questions in the survey for each of those tasks is how
frequently do you perform the task and how critical is it? Now we
use that as a way to understand. How much of the exam should be
devoted to specific sections? And when we got the results of the
survey, we saw that a lot of individuals were saying, you know, on
the, on this final don't, uh,