During the 2022 BGC Annual Forum, twelve Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the environmental, health, and safety auditing field were selected by the Board for Global EHS Credentialing® (BGC®) to oversee the development of the Certified Professional EHS Auditor (CPEA) exam’s Job Task Analysis (JTA).
These SMEs were tasked with developing a new, single CPEA certification exam combining EHS best practices used by Certified Professional EHS Auditors (CPEA) and Certified Professional Safety Auditor (CPSA) professionals.
Working closely with the psychometric and testing professionals at Certiverse, a remote, asynchronous test development platform (certiverse.com), they identified knowledge domains, tasks, and skills essential for performing EHS audits. These tasks and skills were weighted according to their relative importance in EHS auditing practice.
Once the tasks and skills were weighed, a validation survey was conducted. Partitioners representing various practice settings, geographic regions, educational levels, and years of experience were asked to complete the study in three weeks. The data collected from the validation survey was then used to create the new CPEA test blueprint.
While this blueprint acknowledges auditing fundamentals applying to all disciplines, the updated blueprint focuses on standard EHS auditing fundamentals rather than discipline-specific expertise, such as environmental, safety, process safety, and management systems.