ISA's Certified Automation Professional (CAP) exam - Notes

These are just some notes I jotted down while taking an online course, primarily to help me remember the key ideas and valuable takeaways. They’re not meant to cover everything or act as a full summary. If you find them interesting or helpful, maybe they’ll nudge you to check out the course too.

The Certified Automation Professional (CAP) exam is offered by the International Society of Automation (ISA). The ISA’s mission is to advance technical competence by connecting the automation community to achieve operational excellence.

The ISA CAP certification allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise as an automation professional who is responsible for various activities from identifying requirements, design and development of control system hardware and software, deployment of systems and operational support for control and automation systems used in various manufacturing and process industries.

The CAP exam will test your competency in 7 technical topics.

Basic Continuous Control
Basic Discrete, Sequencing, and Manufacturing Control
Advanced Control Topics
Reliability, Safety, and Electrical
Integration and Software
Deployment and Maintenance
Work Structure

There is a percentage of questions from each technical topic in the exam. The latest list of technical topics and the breakdown information is provided in the ISA CAP study guide. You can check whether you are eligible to take the exam on the ISA website.

The best way to prepare for this is to identify the areas that are your strengths and ones where you feel you have limited experience. For example, if you are working in manufacturing you may be more familiar with concepts in Part 2 – Discrete, Sequencing and Manufacturing Control and if you are working in the process industry you may have more experience in Part 1 – Continuous Process Control. Spend more of your time focussing on the new areas, keeping the percentage weight of each topic in mind. Depending on where you are working, you may need to pay attention to the electrical standards that are focused on both American and European standards.

The ISA offer a CAP review course that can be taken to prepare for the exam. The course is available in classroom, virtual classroom, online instructor-guided and self-paced modular formats.

The recommended textbook to prepare for the exam is

A Guide to the Automation Body of Knowledge, by Nicholas P. Sands and Ian Verhappen

I strongly recommend that you read the latest version of this book at least twice in preparation for the exam.

The notes below were made when studying for the exam and have been consolidated onto A3 paper sized images. You can download these if you find them useful.