What useful licenses or certifications are surprisingly cheap and easy to get?
I've been looking into installing air conditioning in the building that will eventually be my office and workshop. Local HVAC contractors gave me extremely large numbers as quotes. I've watched mini split installs and I'm pretty sure they're within DIY range for me. So I spent $10 and a couple of nights of reading, and took the EPA 608 type 2 certification exam today, so now (pending someone watching and approving a 20-minute video of me staring at a phone screen) I can legally install one myself for significantly cheaper.
I've also occasionally considered getting a ham radio license, solely because I like a bunch of adjacent electronics topics and it feels like the kind of thing I could be into. (So far, I haven't bothered because the vibes of the community around it don't feel right for me, but I haven't completely abandoned the idea.)
It occurs to me there are probably several more things like this that I'd never thought about. Small plane pilot's licenses are another, though those require formal training. But attempting to research this mostly returns lists of "you could be an Official Microsoft Certified Professional Excel User!". That's not what I mean.
What other useful licenses can one easily get without making it a whole career? "Useful" here means something like "having the piece of official paper grants privileges that simply learning the underlying knowledge doesn't".
Not a license per say, but CPR certification is very easy to get, and often free with a minimal amount of effort. Hopefully you never need it, but there's really no substitute.
I'm in healthcare, my career started with ten years in the field as a firefighter/paramedic. When training people on cardiac arrests, I would always preach, Good CPR is more valuable than anything else we can do. Because without good chest compressions, none of the other resuscitative efforts will matter!
Pivoting off this, many fire stations and similar locales offer stop the bleed courses. In the early days of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military found that of combat deaths that were ultimately preventable, had the soldiers taken the right actions, more than half were due to bleeding from an extremity. You can learn how to stop critical bleeding and save lives!
CPR is super important, but most people will see more car accidents than cardiac arrests. And finally, learning how to properly apply a tourniquet might save your own life.
Used to work ems years ago, the amount of times I rolled up on someone giving someone a towel bath instead of holding pressure on the wound was insane.
Step one get a cloth-like item, doesn’t have to be absorbent, can use your plain hands in a pinch. Step two hold on wound firmly. Step 3 do not remove, add more if necessary.
People really like to take the cloth and just kinda mop up the blood as it spills out, like they’re giving a sponge bath.
Yes! I used to teach Stop The Bleed to our county law enforcement. It's definitely a very valuable course that I'm glad you didn't overlook like I did when commenting.
My recent CPR class included tourniquet training also
All of them were preventable, had the politicians taken the right actions.
Also, bad CPR is more valuable than no CPR. Even if you haven't taken a course, pumping someone's chest until you're sketched out about the integrity of their ribs to the tune of "staying alive" is a really simple concept, and it is miles above "no CPR". Everything else is a bonus - proper compression depth, ventilating lungs, those are nice. Just check first whether there's a pulse I guess.
Also, depending on your location, dispatch will stay in the line and coach you through it. Apparently, they even have a metronome to keep you in time and remind you to ventilate. So in case of doubt, just call them, put them on speaker and get pumping.
It’s definitely a good idea, but if I ever regain consciousness with all my ribs broken because someone thought I needed CPR—
Well I might still be in pain, but probably a lot less grumpy than the alternative, once I have a moment to think about it
For reference, I live in Ontario, Canada.
The boating course and license cost about $100, took an afternoon,and now I know how to safely use a boat. Very useful on multiple occasions when we wanted to rent a boat and be out on the water.
A firearms license is about $200, takes about 8 hours at a range, and teaches you all about gun safety. The police check for the license takes a bit of time, but it is worth it to have a relatively painless gun control and registration system.
SmartServe costs about $50 and is a course for serving alcohol, which is really great for a bartender to have, but also can be surprisingly useful if you want to have a private party. Some locations need someone who is SmartServe certified for you to rent if you want to have a bar at your party.
Fishing license is super cheap, goes well with the aforementioned boating license. Hunting licenses are also cheap and pair well with the firearms license.
A pilot’s license is not easy to get. Renting a plane and instructor time is expensive, and then you need to keep current by going on a few flights each month. It’s an expensive hobby and rarely a practical way to travel for most people. But I do recommend going on a “discovery flight” (first lesson), which is fun even if you decide not to pursue it.
Can confirm, am licensed pilot. Happy to answer any questions you have OP but I agree that this cert/hobby probably doesn’t meet your criteria.
I got maybe not quite halfway through the PPL (that’s what it’s called in Australia, not sure if they’re global or if they differ between countries? Private Pilot Licence was the entry level of the various licences) a bit over a decade ago, when my dad was happy to pay for it, but yeah at the time they were saying it’s skill-tested but that I should expect around 50 hours flight time before I would be certified, and each lesson was $200-300 for a bit under an hour.
And from there, it would probably be an additional 300-ish hours for a commercial licence (CPL)
Does that roughly line up with your experience/understanding too?
I’m in Canada but yeah that’s roughly similar to here too (you can do your CPL at 250hrs here).
I soloed at about 20 hours and I think I took my PPL flight test at about 60 hours, which is fairly average. Plus ground school, books, headset, subscription to ForeFlight or whatever… I’ve never added up how much my PPL cost but I assume it was north of about $15k (CAD).
I got a Ham Technician license right before the pandemic. Studying for the test was easy. I wish I could find more uses for the hobby because by just connecting to basic local repeaters all I've experienced is old guys talking about their setups. I don't really know what I expected. Getting a General license could at least give me the legal right to get into HF, which seems a bit more interesting since with the right setup you can directly hit across the globe.
I ended up building a nice 2m antenna to get on the morning social net on the repeater where I live. It's kind of the same 7 or so people every morning, but hosting it rotates and the topic's different every day. So that's actually pretty nice. That's about the only use for it I've found, though.
I ended up getting my Extra but haven't really bothered much with HF since my impression of it is about the same as typing "ping" at random websites, but expensive. Still planning to build a 20m antenna on my roof just on the off-chance I do find something charming about it, but I wouldn't say I have high expectations.
I have a nice group of folks to chat with while I'm having my morning coffee, so I'd say I got what I wanted out of the license already. I took a long time deciding to go for it since I figured it was just longer-range CB, and after some time spent trucking I'm fine living the rest of my life never losing IQ points from listening to that garbage again, but it's actually a very different crowd I found in amateur radio.
The process of getting a ham license in the US, if you have a background in electronics and/or physics, is surprisingly trivial, especially since the test process is largely broken: all questions are multiple choice, from a small pool, and are publicly released, so a bit of spaced repetition can get you through all three tests with very minimal effort and no real knowledge of ham radio.
But as someone who I expect had the same interest you have, in my experience the vibe problem you mention is significant. It's particularly the case if you're coming from free software and open hardware backgrounds: surprisingly, the culture seems largely opposed to the values of those communities. While it isn't legal for them to be, many major modes are de facto proprietary, and considering they even get what amount to advertisements into the tests, enforcement seems unlikely. Many supposedly open projects are not, in ways that would be seen as unacceptable or illegal in other communities. And the ban on encryption and refusal of the community to accept that standards of privacy and safety have changed in the modern world make the hobby unsettling at best and dangerous at worst.
If you just want to mess with small radios and repeaters in the US, a GMRS license is probably better. If you want to mess with radio, things using non-ham bands, like LoRa, have potentially more interesting communities.
OTOH, the old hats have, time and time again, proven immensely helpful for emergency comms. And back when you couldn't essentially cheat half the test, the chops to pass it meant gaining the skills to make Satdump
I don't like comments like you posted in the quote, because while I trust it's in good faith here, this is the sort of arguement that is going to be used to claw back the amateur frequencies and auction them off to the highest bidder, closing them off forever.
I do think there is an over-acceptance of closed-off stuff. But thats a thing that can change with time.
And some degree of encryption, highly limited and not anonymous, should be allowed. You still have to provide callsign and name, but not polluting channels continuously with data. Brief SSH connection or short messgae fine, transmitting continously encrypted not.
Both of those things can be true! Very few things are 100% good or 100% bad. I certainly don't think the solution is to abolish ham radio in any capacity.
But the vibes remain, and they're far enough from my and @pallas's values to discourage us from participating. “Yeah, but it could be better" is not a particularly compelling response to that.
The other things you said too, but this is most of it for me. I grew up on the internet, where pseudonyms and anonymity were the norm (and still are the norm, in the spaces I care to hang out in). I don't usually use that option to its full extent (it's not hard to find my full name from what I've posted here) but it's comforting and normal to have the ability to choose how much I share.
And then I wander into this weird alternate universe, where there's a law saying that when in a chat room I must periodically post my full legal name and home address. On the internet, that would be a level of absurdity that even the most ridiculous of governments would not attempt, but... that's exactly the effect of having it all easily searchable by callsign in a public database and requiring people to explicitly identify with that callsign. Somehow, as far as I can tell, this isn't controversial.
Remember how awful most internet comments are with loose moderation?
In online spaces, it's relatively easy to oust bad actors. Not so much for radio transmitters.
Becoming a notary public can be a simple process depending on where you live. Usually, it’s just a process of taking several hours of courses and taking an in-person exam. After getting your fancy stamp, you get to certify that signatures are valid (the person understands what they are signing and that they actually are who they say they are) on certain legal documents.
While it is useful per the definition provided by @em-dash, I don’t know how useful the average person would find it. Needing to notarize a document and simultaneously not being a party signing that document just doesn’t happen that often in your day-to-day. The license is easy enough to obtain, so places that regularly need to notarize tend to have some of their staff licensed for convenience. Worst case, you can pay a notary to meet you somewhere, and it probably won’t cost you more than $40 (usually less).
That alone makes it sound pretty useful to me since you can add it to your resume. I wonder how viable it would be to be a freelance notary to earn some money on the side? Would you need any extra licenses (e.g. a business license)?
Anywhere that regularly needs a notary is already gonna have at least one employee licensed to begin with, and because it's quite a simple process to become one, I doubt there's much problem for most such businesses to have new employees who aren't licensed yet get it once they've been hired.
I think "useful" is a tricky term here, as it can depend on a whole lot of other factors. For example, where I live, an EPA 608 license would let me do things like buy refrigerant but not install a new system - for that, I'd also need a state license (with occupational training requirements), and a permit from the city for a plan that's certified by a plumber and (in most cases) an electrician.
For me, in the places I've lived, a permit to serve alcohol has been pretty easy to get and has let me do things like help out occasionally at a local bar and/or food festivals with alcohol. While it isn't crazy useful, it has opened up some nice options (like bartending for my friend's wedding).
If you work in Quality or Manufacturing, the Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma White Belt is available online for free. It's not super meaningful, but it's a line item on your resume that shows you know what it is, and that you may want to continue the programs.
Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate from the FAA. It allows you to fly drones commercially. Since the FAA's definition of "commercial" is pretty broad, this can come in handy for things like YouTube videos, real estate, group photos, etc. I visited the Great Salt Lake and was able to be grated a permit because I had the certification.
I first got the certification a few years ago and I had to sit a proctored multiple choice test. It wasn't too hard to study for and the FAA provided a decent study guide. There are loads of free resources on YouTube and elsewhere online. The trickiest part for me was learning to read aeronautical charts. Still, I probably studied for 20 hours or less and paid $100 ish for the test. I have to be recertified every 2 years, but that is done online now.
I already had a drone and I was able to make a few bucks off it from time to time. Certainly, not too hard or expensive, but it has come in handy.
EPA 609 is very similar but for cars. So that might be an easy cert to get.
Defensive Driving courses are pretty useful and can often reduce your car insurance premium (by a small amount).
Knowing what to do when power lines are downed on the road also seems useful for that situation--but you could probably just stop and Google it at the time to remember what you should do.
Training courses for SCUBA, Delta-P, knowing a thing or two about LASERs are useful but also somewhat esoteric.
First Aid and OSHA are probably the most useful things to learn.
Forklift Operator Certification!
I don't think this is the case?
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/part-82/subpart-F#p-82.161(a)(1) :
The exempt refrigerants include none of the common household AC ones.
(Incidentally, it's not clear to me that the DIY-focused brands that ship linesets with refrigerant already in them are actually exempt from this, but everyone seems to think they are. I did consider that but they were more than $10 more expensive.)
hmm maybe not then. I've removed this from my previous comment to reduce the spread of any misinformation
If you're working or want to work in the UK hospitality industry, apparently having a personal licence to sell alcohol will get you pretty far. It's not required in order to work in a pub, but any sales of alcohol either need to be made by or under the authority of a Personal Licence holder.
It requires you to apply to your local authority, fill out some forms, send over your ID, undergo a basic DBS check on your criminal record (basically only shows unspent criminal convictions or cautions/youth disposals, so unless you've been committing serious violent, sexual or terrorist offences, your conviction will be considered "spent" after a certain length of time), and show proof that you completed a valid licensing qualification.
The easiest and cheapest way to get qualified is through the British Institute of Innkeeping. Completing a BIIAB Level 2 Award for Personal Licence Holders can cost anywhere from £50 - £200 (plus VAT), depending on if you're self-learning, or attending virtual/in-person classroom lessons.
Can you share your EPA608 reading list?
hoping someone will share stuff on doing a building foundation and or framing a house.
I don't have much of one, but:
A forklift licence is useful, particularly if you work in a field where you may encounter them. In Australia you're looking at a day course to get it and then you can renew it every five years without needing further tests
A truck licence can also be useful. What you can and can't drive varies a lot on region but in Australia getting a MR/HR licence is reasonably easy in a day course - assuming you're learning synchro manual or auto - and lets you drive rigid heavy vehicles (two axle sets only for MR, three or more axle sets with HR). Again it's most useful if your career is at least adjacent to heavy vehicles but even just being able to rent a proper truck to move your own stuff (or friends') is handy.
A combination of truck and forklift licences also gives a fallback job option if you ever need it, as transport companies are almost always after people with these licences.