Increasing your Marketability

The Certificate in Environmental Practice (CEP) is an ideal tool to increase your marketability among employers when applying for jobs, depending, of course, on how you market the Certificate and your newly acquired skills. An employer will recognize the host institution, Royal Roads University, but may not know about the CEP yet and how it differs from other programs. To ensure that you maximize the value of the CEP, it is essential to communicate its advantages to employers.

Some key messages to capitalize and elaborate on in a cover letter, resume, interview, etc. include:

• The CEP is industry specific because it was designed by experts in the environmental sector.
  The National Occupational Standards (NOS) for Environmental Employment was used as a continual guide to design this Certificate. The NOS refer to a defined set of skills and competencies for each area of the environmental sector as developed by hundreds of experts in the industry from across Canada. The combination of courses taken in this Certificate, address each of the skills and competencies outlined in the National Occupational Standards for Environmental Employment, ensuring that you have the foundations to be successful in this industry.
  
  
• The CEP is field-specific because of the 10 optional concentrations.
  Not only is the Certificate designed for the industry as a whole, but through the concentration option, it is created to ease the bridge into a specific field within the environmental sector. This ensures that individuals within the CEP are able to gear the program towards their own interests and intended career path. Making specific mention of courses and classroom experiences that apply directly to the job that you are applying to will tie in the relevance of the CEP to that occupation. 
  
  
• It focuses directly on up-to-date issues related to the environment industry within Canada.
  The environment industry has changed drastically within the past few years, and it is imperative to understand the issues that face Canadian industry and consequently how to approach solutions to them. The courses in the CEP are up-to-date and relevant to the Canadian environmental sector today.
  
  
• The CEP is backed by 25 universities and colleges across Canada.
  The Certificate Program is hosted by Royal Roads University, but elective courses are made up of a collection of environmental courses offered from institutions throughout Canada. This ensures that the best of the best courses are provided to students, while acknowledging the institutions’ support for this program.

Professional Designations

Are you interested in pursing a greater level of professional recognition within the environment industry? The Canadian Environmental Certification Approvals Board (CECAB) offers a professional designation for environmental practitioners, creating an industry standard for professional accountability and on-the-job competence defined through the National Occupational Standards for Environmental Employment. The designations offered by CECAB in 19 fields of specialization for environmental practitioners are:

• CCEP (Certified Canadian Environmental Practitioner) for practitioners with more than five years of environmental experience, and
• CEPIT (Canadian Environmental Practitioner-in-Training) for practitioners with less than five years of experience, and newcomers to Canada.

As a stepping-stone toward the CCEP designation, the CEPIT certification is a developmental certification designed for emerging environmental practitioners. This designation will help you to interpret your education and experience to employers while establishing a set of goals and career path towards obtaining the CCEP designation.

For both certifications, the application process has two parts, both completed online. During the first part of the process, the applicant completes an online evaluation that defines their level of proficiency and ensures that the requirements for work experience and education have been met. The second part consists of a peer evaluation.

Visit www.cecab.org for more information, or to complete your application online.