HP cert's, again.

["ZAPP, NEAL (JSC-SD)" <neal.zapp1@jsc.nasa.gov>]

"I think, since this is a sensitive issue, we loose sight of the fact that
public safety is the number one goal and if in trying to meet this goal some
very competent folks get turned off because they have not gone to the effort
to get licensed/
certified, that's the price that is paid."

This is exactly why my second message got posted.  Let me state the position
I'm addressing again.  I've been working in the capacity of an HP for a bit
more than two years.  I'm degreed a few times over.  My first the closest
B.S. I hold to engineering is one in physics, so if you check the reg.'s,
I'm not eligible for a P.E., regardless of the rest of my education, or the
effort to which I'm willing to go, since my B.S. is not in engineering.  So
no P.E. for me, no matter how good I am.  Having been out for only two
years, I'm a little shy of the ABHP time requirements, so I cannot be a CHP,
no matter how good I am.

Let me be clear to everyone, since at least one person has a misimpression
of my meaning.  I only mean to point out that the point of view that a quick
glance at a resume for a few letters does people, albeit in a very small
demographic, in my position, who are competent but young, a disservice, and
I sincerely hope that HR departments everywhere wait until I've been able to
earn my five years, sit for part two, and stamp the letters on my resume,
otherwise my wife will be more than a little bit upset at having to pay off
student loans for me.  As I stated before, I have no problem with the use of
certifications as a 'first approximation' for knowledge of a person's
competence.  What I do have a problem with is the assumption that a
thirty-second look at my resume, looking for one set of test results could
decide an awful lot for my life, given that I'm forbidden from getting the
needed letters for a little while.  Please, try to remember that I am well
into the books for my own day in ABHP court, so I buy the need for everyone
who cares to know that I could at some point take and pass (excuse me for a
short prayer) that test.  My problem is with the attitude that it's ok to
build a workforce which affects "public safety" on the basis of three, or
even five letters, no matter how quickly you have to hire contract work.  If
the issue is truly the safety of the unknowing masses, then maybe a little
more attention to the actual knowledge of the people involved is warranted.

One more time, I have no problem with tests to add letters behind our names.
I think they're fun, and I admit to a point useful to guage a person's
experience.  My point is that it takes more than any one metric to identify
a competent professional.  Also I admit, again, that my views are prejudiced
by the fact that because of my relative inexperience I cannot take the test,
making mine a personal comment, rather than a "state of the union" on health
physics.  My views (after all this typing) come down to two questions.  What
does the fact that I haven't passed a test I'm not allowed to take tell you
about my ability to protect public safety?  Does the fact that I have
(including an M.S. in nuclear engineering, so engineering is represented) a
B.S. in physics to work in "health physics" rather than one in engineering,
and thus can't be a P.E. because my B.S. isn't engineering, tell you
anything about my ability to correctly label and contain outgoing waste
sources?  I think we'd all be well served to remember that safety IS the
goal, and that any one test, regardless of the rapidity with which a
workforce must be hired, is not a defining characteristic.  I'm not sure I
know what the answer is, I just wish one of you people out there reading
this would convince the ABHP to let me go ahead and sit before applications
shrink down to one or two boxes to check.  Please, before anyone else gets
bent out of shape reading this, understand that I have meant any and all of
what I've posted today just as a reminder that there is a small portion of
the population out there to whom boiling down hiring practices to less than
a handfull of certifications might be unfair.  Of course, someone who's been
doing this twenty or fifty years, or whatever, is better to head up a
program to apply good industrial hygiene in this area than I am.  I'm at
least smart enough to know what I don't know.  But I think that I should be
allowed to get the jobs I have to have held to be allowed to take the test.
That's all.  If new graduates, at whatever level, can't go get jobs as HP's
because everyone begins looking for cert.'s to discern quality from it's
lack, and they have to have been HP's to be certified, then after a while
there will be noone to be certified.  Besides, I don't LIKE being part of
the "price that's paid."  


E. Neal Zapp
NASA/JSC, Radiation Biology
Bldg. 37, Rm. 167
(281) 483-2244 (O)
(713) 765-2193 (P)

Any opinions expressed herein, or incorrect assertions, are attributable
only to me.  Not to you, not to him, not to her, not to them, not to us, to
me.  Noone else could possibly be this brain-dead without having the plug
pulled, so it must be me.




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