From CETP to PEP, propane industry revamps training program

The propane industry’s employee training program is in transition. You could even say the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) is putting some pep in the program’s step.

That’s because the industry’s long-running Certified Employee Training Program (CETP) will become the PERC Education Program (PEP) in 2025. It’s a transition that will ultimately change how the industry trains its workforce. It’s also a transition that PERC says will take place over the coming months.

Eric Kuster, senior vice president of safety, education and compliance at PERC, has made the sunsetting of CETP a key talking point in his safety presentations at industry events this year.

Kuster says the industry recognized a need to transition from CETP’s one-size-fits-all approach to training that’s job specific, shorter, more focused, modular, customizable and available online and in person.

“We had a lot of redundancy in these programs, and the biggest thing was those programs were not customizable. We realized we needed to change that,” Kuster says.

Moving forward, companies can customize the propane industry training modules to their needs – say they want to build their own bobtail course for employees, for example – and states can build their own programs to meet specific requirements.

It comes down to options

“One of the things that we are building into everything – for marketers, for trade schools, for technical schools – are options,” Kuster says. “We’re becoming a library of materials [where] they can pick and choose what they need to use and how they need to use it.”

The new program was born in 2020 from PERC’s strategic pillar that emphasizes the council’s role in creating quality safety and training programs.

“We really started looking at our training materials,” Kuster says. “The older programs were driven by code requirements and regulatory requirements. We started to ask ourselves: Why should we be doing training?”

For employee and consumer safety, of course, but PERC sought to create a program that was instructionally sound, reflecting changes in education and involving professional adult educators. It sought to complement the “How?” of the training programs with the “Why?” for those who use them. It asked the states, which receive 20 percent of PERC assessment dollars, what they needed from such a program.

The training module approach has gotten a lot of positive attention. Employees only need to consume the smaller modules for their specific jobs, which tend to improve retention rates.

“We’re going to save time,” Kuster says. “We’re going to be able to concentrate on the things they need to know.”

What PERC and the industry are undertaking is no small feat as they begin to move away from CETP and toward these more specific learning paths. And so, the transition year will continue, and the council will ready the materials for the 2025 launch.

You’ll continue to hear more about the CETP-to-PEP switchover as PERC develops communications for the industry. For more about the program, visit propane.com/providers/perc-education-program.

Meet Chris Markham

Markham

Chris came to us with that long red hair that made him hard to miss. Only days after starting as LP Gas’ new managing editor, he went for a haircut.

Suffice to say, Chris looks a bit different today – but no matter. We’re excited about what he brings to the team. He’s a talented, young editor from Dayton, Ohio, who received his English degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He also came to us with business-to-business media experience.

As I write this, Chris is nearing a month with LP Gas. He’s written his first feature story (see page 24), he’s edited many of the pages in this issue and he continues to ask multiple questions daily about our processes and the propane industry. There’s a good chance he’ll be asking you questions in the months ahead.

Please help me welcome Chris Markham to this great industry.