What is the SEIA/ANSI 301 Standard and Why Does It Matter for Solar and BESS O&M Technicians?

Job titles, pay scales, and expectations for O&M technicians have historically varied widely from one solar company to the next. A Level 2 technician at one employer might be doing completely different work than a Level 2 at another. For technicians trying to advance their careers and for employers trying to hire and place people correctly, that inconsistency can create problems.

The SEIA/ANSI 301 Standard was developed to fix that. Published by the Solar Energy Industries Association and recognized by the American National Standards Institute, it establishes a common framework for O&M technician training across the solar and energy storage industry, covering residential, commercial and industrial, and utility-scale market segments. The standard defines technician competencies from Level 1 through Level 4, giving employers and workers a shared language for skills, knowledge, and career progression.

When Amicus O&M Cooperative built the Solar PV and BESS O&M Tech 1 and Tech 2 courses, aligning to SEIA/ANSI 301 was a deliberate choice. In the video below, Amanda Bybee explains why that alignment matters, both for employers trying to assess and place technicians and for workers who want a clear picture of what it takes to move up. If you’re ready to build a stronger O&M team with training tied to an industry-recognized standard, Tech 2 is available now on HeatSpring.

Transcript below.

Brit: While we’re talking about the SEIA/ANSI 301 Standard, Tech 1 and Tech 2 both align with that. Why do you feel like it’s critical for the training to match up to a standard? 

Amanda: Well, the standard was the first attempt in our industry to get everyone, all the companies, all the employers on the same page with how we define these tech levels. There’s a lot of advantages to that. From an employer perspective, it makes it much easier to try to figure out where does a person fall in terms of their skills, knowledge, and expertise against a common standard. 

Before we started the work of trying to build consensus around the standard, you had different companies defining those levels differently and it made it really difficult to know when you had an applicant come knock on your door, where to put them in terms of their title, pay, et cetera. This is an important way to establish an objective measure of what do they know, where do they fall on this framework. 

For the technicians, I think it’s also really helpful to see what is expected and where the gaps in knowledge and experience might be, so that if they desire to keep moving up the ladder, they know clearly what is needed and how to get there. 

The standard feels like an important way to levelize the labor market and to give individuals more clarity on what they need to do to continue progressing. That’s why we’ve tied our training to the standard, which is a voluntarily adopted idea for companies. We think that there’s going to be a lot of benefit when we do have critical mass of companies aligning to this. It’s just going to  level everything out, give us common language, and help normalize what we expect of technicians at different levels.