When current Certified Functional Safety Professionals and Experts (CFSP/CFSEs) come to us seeking further education, we commonly point them to the recently established CFSE Endorsement Program.  However, we are often posed questions in return:

• What’s an Endorsement program?
• Is there a test involved?
• If so, how do I study for it?
• Will I eventually need to get re-certified?
• How many endorsements are there, and how many am I allowed to get?
• What are the benefits of achieving these endorsements?

A lot of questions, I know.  Therefore I have decided to write a few blog entries in series to answer these questions for everyone since it has become a hot topic.

What is the CFSE Endorsement program?

The CFSE Endorsement program has been established to help current holders of CFSE and CFSP certification build/demonstrate expertise and knowledge in specific focus area of functional safety. The CFSE Governance board felt that in order to keep up with changes in functional safety and to allow candidates to build on their existing broad base of functional safety knowledge by developing and demonstrating expertise in specific focus areas:

So what can you expect to be tested on within each category?

Let me go into a little more detail on three of the endorsement options.

Functional Safety Management:

• Understanding the purpose of FSM and expected results from a good FSM program
• Describe the essential elements of document control
• Know FSM auditing techniques

Alarm Management

• Understand the alarm management lifecycle: similarities, differences and connections to the functional safety lifecycle
• Evaluate risk reduction / probability of failure on demand (PFD) of alarms used as an independent protection layer
• Optimize the effectiveness of alarms used as safeguards and layers of protection

SIL Verification / SIF Verification

• Understand architecture constraints and when they apply
• Demonstrate ability to calculate simple PFH / PFDavg for a set of equipment
• Know when to use “cycle test” data

Hopefully by now you understand the purpose of the CFSE/CFSP Endorsement program, and why it has been established.  So how will it help you?  What are the benefits?  Who should participate?  These questions and more will be covered in the next entry in this blog series.