For nearly forty years, three letters settled whether a driver or service tech was trained: CETP. A licensing board recognized it, an insurer asked for the certificate at renewal, and a hiring manager knew exactly what it meant. That shorthand is changing. The Propane Education & Research Council has begun replacing the Certified Employee Training Program with the PERC Education Program, or PEP, rolling it out from 2025.
The training itself got better. It is shorter, role-specific, delivered online, and it carries accredited CEUs the old program never awarded. The trouble sits one layer down, where a national program meets fifty state rulebooks, stacks of insurance files, and the judgment of local inspectors. None of those updated the day PERC flipped the switch. That lag is now every operator's job to manage.
First, the panic-killer: nobody's earned credential expired. Completed CETP certifications stay valid and stay on the PERC Learning Center transcript. PERC's archival language governs whether a program is open for new enrollment, not certificates already earned. One narrower clock applies. An employee who passed the CETP exam but hasn't finished the skills assessment has twelve months from the exam date to close it out. Anyone telling you the whole crew must re-certify today is overstating it.
The real work is forward-looking, and it lives in four gaps PERC was never built to close.
State law still names CETP. Plenty of states wrote "CETP" into their LP-gas licensing rules, and a statute doesn't rewrite itself when a provider modernizes. Idaho, Colorado, and Utah name CETP in their codes, and almost no state has formally ruled that PEP satisfies a rule written for the old name. No regulator has rejected PEP either, but that silence is the exposure, not the approval. Texas sits outside the question, licensing through its Railroad Commission under rules that name neither program.
How you take PEP can matter as much as whether you take it. Even where PEP is accepted, the delivery channel isn't always swappable. Pennsylvania accepts PEP for its Act 61 framework, but the state association's guidance is blunt that its sponsored students must not self-start the online pathway. New Jersey accepts PEP under an equivalency clause and wants PERC Learning Center records in a specific format. Sometimes "yes" arrives with conditions attached.
The inspector's rulebook mentions neither program. The fire marshal or inspector at your door works mainly from NFPA 58, which names neither CETP nor PEP, and states and localities adopt and amend it differently. Nobody has documented an inspector turning away a PEP-trained crew, so this is exposure to know about, not a forecast. An operator whose records are current, and who can explain how PEP transcripts and hands-on paperwork line up, is in far better shape than one improvising at the truck door.
Nobody tracks your hands-on training but you. This is the quiet one. The Learning Center tracks eLearning completions. It does not track the OJT Worksheets that replaced the old skills exam. You record those yourself, separate from the transcript. So the transcript alone never proves a tech is fully trained. Keep your own worksheet file beside it and produce both, per driver, on demand.
Now the part the news coverage skips: what you actually do Monday morning.
1. Pull the roster and mark who is mid-certification. 2. Make two calls per state, to the LP-gas regulator and the state propane gas association, asking whether PEP satisfies your licensing requirement and whether a delivery channel or records format is required. Write down the answer and the date. 3. Set your company up as a PERC Learning Center administrator so you can pull and print transcripts before your next hire, not after. 4. Open an OJT Worksheet file for every employee, and ask your insurer, in writing, what PEP-era documentation they now expect. 5. Re-check quarterly, because modules retire and states issue guidance on their own clocks.
That list is exactly the work our Training pillar was built for. TankSpotter is a Field Worker OS, with Service, Safety, Sales, and Training in one app, and the Training side runs a built-in LMS aligned to the industry's standard curriculum, right beside the certification and inspection records your Safety compliance depends on. Instead of a spreadsheet that goes stale, you get one place where every tech's training status, cert currency, and OJT records live together, ready the moment an inspector or underwriter says "show me." The operators who come through this shift cleanly won't be the ones who trained hardest. They'll be the ones who can answer, per driver, without guessing. For the full picture on the transition and the four gaps, read our full reporting on the training transition (https://propaneinsider.com/newsletter/2921).
Want to see how we keep certifications current and audit-ready without a spreadsheet? Request a demo or explore TankSpotter (https://tankspotter.io).
First published in Propane Insider.