A decade full of knowledge

For Pilz, the same prin­ci­ples apply around the world: the cre­ation of safe working envi­ron­ments for everyone who uses and main­tains machines. Leg­is­la­tion, stan­dards and direc­tives alone are not enough; engi­neers need the nec­es­sary com­pe­tence and a deeper under­standing in order to imple­ment machinery safety in com­pli­ance with direc­tives and stan­dards. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion of knowl­edge is essen­tial here. For Pilz, Safety is more than just a product: For a long time now, the com­pany has made its years of exper­tise avail­able as a com­pre­hen­sive range of training courses. Every year the Pilz Academy trains around 15,000 people in 50 coun­tries with 120 trainers!

CMSE was the pioneer

Inter­na­tion­ally uni­form and inde­pen­dent qual­i­fi­ca­tions for machinery safety have only existed for ten years. In 2013 Pilz intro­duced the CMSE or Cer­ti­fied Machinery Safety Expert qual­i­fi­ca­tion in four coun­tries – the world’s first cer­ti­fied inter­na­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment for machinery safety. The four-day course gives in five mod­ules an overall view of the sub­ject of machinery safety and con­veys com­pre­hen­sive knowl­edge on and about the machine life­cycle. TÜV NORD was our partner from the very begin­ning: The final TÜV NORD cer­tifi­cate that is issued after passing the test is valid inter­na­tion­ally as the CMSE mod­ules are stan­dard­ised world­wide and are of a uni­form level.

CMSE is cur­rently offered in over 30 coun­tries in 15 lan­guages. CMSE is not only used for per­sonal qual­i­fi­ca­tion. Inter­na­tion­ally oper­ating com­pa­nies also use the courses offered world­wide for the uni­form pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of their employees at var­ious loca­tions. In other words, the qual­i­fi­ca­tion sets the com­pany stan­dard for com­pe­tence in regard to machinery safety.

Qualification at the expert level

CMSE has also set stan­dards at Pilz. The com­pany has estab­lished addi­tional qual­i­fi­ca­tion courses at the expert level that are inter­na­tional and stan­dard­ised. These include, for example, CECE – Cer­ti­fied Expert in CE Marking, during which par­tic­i­pants gain in-depth knowl­edge on every indi­vidual step of the overall CE marking process for machines; CEFS – Cer­ti­fied Expert in Func­tional Safety for teaching how com­plex safety sys­tems are designed in com­pli­ance with the rel­e­vant stan­dards; or the brand new CESA – Cer­ti­fied Expert for Secu­rity in Automa­tion, which tackles the topic of Secu­rity (see page 4).

The suc­cess story also con­tinues with CMSE itself: In 2023, the tenth year, the 10,000th par­tic­i­pant should suc­cess­fully com­plete the qual­i­fi­ca­tion and in future be able to use the title CMSE.