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by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Recipe for CRE Exam Preparation

In a recent discussion in the Linkedin group ASQ Reliability Division, John Pagendarm replied with his recipe for CRE exam preparation. With John’s permission, I’m posting here.


Here is my recipe for passing the CRE.

  1. Get the CRE body of knowledge refresher course (pub. by Indiana Quality Council, I believe.)
  2. Work through EVERY problem in the text until you understand them. (NOT the practice questions, the ones used as examples in the text.) You need to know the why and how of every step in every example. (The exercises were OK too, but I generally did not do them.)
  3. I took a refresher course also. I think that was necessary because I needed an introduction to some of the topics.
  4. I created a personal glossary of the book that indexed every subtopic in the binder too. (Before anyone asks, the binders have changed in the many years since I took the exam and the glossary has morphed into something very different so it is no longer useful for the CRE exam.)

I passed the CRE the first time. It was a day of very good fortune.

That was a lot of work. I was unemployed so every day I went to my ‘job’ and studied. This went on for weeks. With 2 kids in college, I was well motivated. I figure it is worth greater job security and about a 12% greater salary at this point.

Also, there are three books that I keep handy all of the time.
O’Connor – Practical Reliability Engineering
Ireson – Handbook of Reliability Engineering and Management
Tobias & Trindade – Applied Reliability

John


If you have a recipe for success, please add a comment. What worked for you? How are you preparing for the exam?


 

Related:

CRE Preparation Course

First Five Questions

Filed Under: Articles, CRE Prep, CRE Preparation Notes Tagged With: cre prep

About Fred Schenkelberg

I am the reliability expert at FMS Reliability, a reliability engineering and management consulting firm I founded in 2004. I left Hewlett Packard (HP)’s Reliability Team, where I helped create a culture of reliability across the corporation, to assist other organizations.

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