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What is CLP Mastery?

CLP Mastery is an expert system helping professionals learn to classify, label, pack and compile Safety Data Sheets for hazardous chemicals in the EU, GB and NI.  It combines live online weekly training over a 6 week period with monthly Ask Us Anything sessions, to give support over the whole year.  After the first year, you can become a Member and get full access in subsequent years, to help keep up to date.

CLP Mastery isn’t just a training course, it’s a complete ecosystem of tools to enable you to classify, label and pack, and compile SDSs without using software, or giving you the methods to provide evidence to check and challenge the outputs from software.  

CLP Mastery has been running as a live training course in person or online since 2010.

CLP Fastrak is a simplified version of CLP Mastery, to help kick-start your CLP and SDS journey, which runs over a 3-day period (morning sessions).  It was developed in 2024 as a way of training software users in the principles behind the software, although it also helps other people too.

CLP Fastrak is ideal for:

  • People starting out with CLP and SDSs
  • If you need to understand what’s inside the software “black box”
  • Anyone who’s really short on time

Our courses are for people who have, or will soon have, direct responsibility for classifying, labelling and producing SDSs for hazardous chemical products, in GB, NI and EU. We also cover “pure” GHS, which helps when you’re dealing with other jurisdictions.

We train industrial chemists, chemical engineers, regulatory affairs specialists, Health and Safety officers, and anyone with that responsibility as part of their work.  We’ve also helped several DGSAs get to grips with CLP and REACH, as it’s quite a different system to Dangerous Goods.

Mastery is for people who want to know everything, and really dive deep into the regulations.  Fastrak is for people who need a working overview, so they can use software competently, or review other people’s work.

Yes, we welcome applications from our colleagues who are in business to provide SDS support to other companies (as long as you don’t offer training!).  We all learn together, as it’s such a large topic no one brain can understand it all.

We currently run Fastrak twice a year, but we only run Mastery once a year.

There are three reasons why we only run CLP Mastery once a year:

  • getting expert in CLP and SDSs isn’t usually an urgent task (starting with them can be, which is why we’ve got Fastrak)
  • it’s a big commitment in time, energy and attention for you and for us, so annually is better
  • it allows us to do other work like our environmental consultancy, where we have to read a lot of SDSs and use them for modelling incidents, so that keeps us in touch with the reality they describe – we don’t just “fly desks” here

That’s a great question, as self-serve courses are usually available to anyone who’ll pay, and at any time, so they’re great for urgent issues.

However, we want to make sure the people taking our courses will really benefit from them, which is why they are by invitation.  And we’ve found a lot of problems with many online self-serve courses (regardless of topic), which we’d prefer to avoid.

One of the main problems with self-serve courses is that people drop out and don’t finish them.  Or, if they’re modular, they pick up the modules they’re interested in, and skip the rest.

We know that CLP and the SDS compilation process really needs to be considered as a whole.  For example, skipping substance classification from first principles means you’ve missed how to classify the physical hazards of mixtures, which is not good.  And we also want to know that everyone who’s been through the course is genuinely competent, which can be difficult to do for self-serve.

We even fell into the “self serve” trap ourselves, as we used to run what is now CLP Mastery as self-serve, but also had an Accountability Programme to encourage people to participate and implement the training.  But we found that this isn’t nearly as effective as getting our trainees to attend live training and work through exercises together and discuss the findings (like we used to in our in-person training).  

And we’re all about our lovely trainees becoming competent and confident, so if it’s not working for you, it’s not working for us.  Not to mention that with the rate of change of some of the regulations or data, it’s easier to have a live course we update each time it runs, rather than having to re-record videos.  And live is so much more exciting and engaging, as we can all interact together, and you can point out my bloopers!

Some topics are suitable for self-serve (a lot of marketing learning, or IT stuff, can be good to learn that way), but for something as complex and important as in depth learning on CLP and SDSs, we don’t think it’s appropriate.

So CLP Mastery is not available self-serve.

We are looking at whether Fastrak could be run as a self-serve course, because that does tend to be more urgent, and might be more successful, but we’d have to engineer it very carefully to be able to ensure the same success for our trainees.

Generally, you need a GCSE or O-level/O-grade in Chemistry to be able to take the course, although a higher qualification helps.  If you’re not a chemist, as long as you have access to one in your business, you should be fine.

We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, so we won’t accept trainees who are in education, or in management without direct responsibility for chemicals.

We provide a certificate of attendance for CLP Fastrak, and a certificate of completion, with a list of modules, for CLP Mastery (as long as you complete the homework to a satisfactory level).

We have looked at accreditation from various bodies. We don’t think accreditation is appropriate for CPD purposes, as the certificates already show the time which you’ve spent in face-to-face learning.

Accreditation through a reputable third party, such as the RSC or IOSH is possible, but with such a fast-moving set of regulations, parts of any course are likely to be out of date by the time it’s been accredited.  We also don’t want to give our proprietary methods away ;)! 

This issue affects every course covering CLP and SDSs – in order to become accredited, you can only cover “the basics”, which don’t change much, rather than reflecting all the extra things which we think industry staff will benefit from understanding.

Our main trainer, Janet Greenwood is a soil scientist by training, who ended up in the chemical industry by accident, but loved being an industrial chemist. She is also a trained teacher at Secondary School level, with Qualified Teacher Status. 

While she has taken a couple of external courses on this topic, most of the material has come from reading the regulations and attempting to implement them.  This is how every training course in this area started out when the CLP and REACH regulations came out – nobody knew anything about them, so it was all “first principles” learning. The courses have developed since 2010, first as in-person and then as online video, and now the perfect blend of live training over the internet.

Many trainers in this area are either full-time trainers or desk-based consultants.  TT Environmental don’t just compile SDSs, they use them in their consultancy work in Environmental Permitting and COMAH Environmental Risk Assessments, which Janet believes gives her a different, more practical perspective on the SDS.

As a co-founder of the Chemical Regulations Self Help Group, she has been involved in quarterly discussions including CLP and REACH for many years, and sees herself as an eternal student who is trying to share what she’s learned in as effective a way as possible.

There’s currently no standardised external exam for SDS compilers, unlike the DGSA exams, for example.  So it’s difficult to know exactly what REACH Annex II (and the GHS standard) mean by “competence”.  However, we believe that completing CLP Mastery successfully will definitely help demonstrate that you have received relevant training, and it should mean that you can compile an SDS reasonably well.  (The HSE state that “there is no such thing as a perfect SDS”).

TT Environmental was set up on the 20th August 2001, so we’ve got a track record in supporting the chemical industry and chemical-using industries. 

You can find our consultancy website here: https://ttenvironmental.co.uk/

Our free weekly email newsletter, Chemicals Coffee Time here: https://chemicalscoffeetime.co.uk/

And our work with the Chemical Regulations Self Help Group here: https://www.chemselfhelp.co.uk/

The current fees are here: https://clpmastery.com/pricing/

If you need more info, click the button below to talk with Janet:

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