Credentials, Licenses and the Requirement Behind Each One
Graduate Pest Control publishes its license numbers and the requirement behind every credential it holds, so a buyer can check them rather than take them on trust. Ryan Katz holds New York certified applicator C1822141 in categories 7A, 7F and 8, is PCQI and HACCP certified, and teaches rodent exclusion abroad.
Why publish a page like this?
Because the question a serious buyer asks is not “are you good at this” but “who am I actually hiring, and what can I check.”
Those are different questions and only one of them can be answered honestly on a website. Any firm can describe itself as experienced. Very few will print a number a stranger can take to a state agency, and fewer still will say what a certification required before it was awarded, because the requirement is usually the least impressive part of the story.
Here the requirement is the story. A credential is worth reading about only if you know what it cost to obtain, what it costs to keep, and what it lets the holder do that a firm without it cannot do. Strip those three things out and you have a logo. Leave them in and you have evidence, which is a different category of thing and is what a procurement file needs.
So this page is organized around three questions asked of every item: what did it require, what does it change, and where can you check it. It also does the less usual thing of stating what each item is not, because the most common failure in this industry is not a false claim, it is a true claim allowed to imply something larger than itself.
There is one more reason for the page. Graduate publishes no promises about outcomes. What it publishes instead are license numbers, certifications with named issuing bodies, and the requirements behind them — the things that can be checked by somebody who has never met us and has no reason to be generous.
What do the two New York numbers mean, and why are there two?
Because a company and a person are licensed separately in New York, and confusing them is the single most common way a buyer ends up unable to check anything.
Graduate Pest Control, Inc. holds New York pesticide business registration 03298. This is the company’s registration to operate as a pesticide business in the state. It attaches to the firm.
Ryan Katz holds New York certified applicator C1822141, in categories 7A, 7F and 8. This is a personal certification, held by an individual, and it is the one governing what may lawfully be done at your property.
The categories describe scope, and scope is the useful part:
7A — structural and rodent control. The larger share of the practice, and the category behind the exclusion and rodent work.
7F — food-processing environments. The plants and warehouses, and the category that sits underneath the food-safety work described further down this page.
8 — public health pest control. The category that covers mosquito work as a public health matter.
What is not held matters as much. Category 3A, ornamentals and turf, is not held. That boundary is why Graduate takes no planting work, no turf program and no commercial grounds contract, and it is stated here rather than discovered later. Category 8 covers mosquito work as public health; it is not a license to run a landscape spray program, and the two get conflated constantly by firms that would rather not explain the difference.
Termite work is a second boundary of a different kind: it is simply not offered. That is a decision about the practice rather than about the license.
The rules behind all of this — what certification means in New York, what a business registration is, how the categories are structured — are set out on New York pesticide applicator requirements, and the practical version, how to check a contractor before you hire one, is on verifying a pest control contractor.
What is PCQI, and what does it let a contractor do?
PCQI stands for Preventive Controls Qualified Individual, and unlike most items on this list it is not a badge awarded by an association — it is a role defined in federal regulation, at 21 CFR 117.180, under the Food Safety Modernization Act.
The regulation is specific about what a PCQI does or oversees:
preparation of the food safety plan;
validation of the preventive controls;
review of monitoring records and corrective-action records;
reanalysis of the food safety plan;
and the written justifications required when any of those run past their permitted intervals.
Qualification comes one of two ways: completion of training in the development and application of risk-based preventive controls at least equivalent to a standardized curriculum recognized as adequate by FDA, or job experience demonstrably providing equivalent knowledge. The training itself has to be documented — date, type, and who was trained.
Then comes the sentence that makes this credential commercially interesting rather than merely respectable. The regulation states that the preventive controls qualified individual need not be an employee of the facility.
That is the door. An outside specialist holding PCQI can lawfully do or oversee the activities above for a plant, rather than standing outside the food safety plan waiting to be handed a work order. In practice it changes what the conversation with a quality manager can be about. A contractor without it services devices, files a report and has no position on where pest control sits in the plan. A contractor with it can discuss why a monitoring device is placed where it is in the plan’s own language, what the trend data is for, and what happens to the pest section when the plan is reanalysed.
What it does not do: holding PCQI does not make Graduate the plant’s PCQI of record, and a pest program is a prerequisite program rather than a preventive control. Overstating either would be the kind of small false note that an auditor catches immediately.
What does HACCP add on top of that?
HACCP — hazard analysis and critical control point — is the framework the modern food safety world is built on, published by FDA and built on seven principles: conduct a hazard analysis, determine the critical control points, establish critical limits, establish monitoring procedures, establish corrective actions, establish verification procedures, and establish record-keeping and documentation.
Pest control does not usually sit at a critical control point. It sits underneath the plan as a prerequisite program — one of the foundational conditions the plan assumes are already true. That placement is exactly why the documentation standard is so unforgiving. A prerequisite program is not judged on whether it worked last week; it is judged on whether it can be shown to have been working continuously, in records, months after the fact.
The practical consequence for a facility is that a pest program has to be written to be read by somebody hostile to it. Device maps that match the devices actually on the floor. Service records that record findings rather than attendance. Corrective actions closed out with evidence. Trend analysis that survives being asked for eighteen months at once. That is a documentation discipline before it is a pest control discipline, and it is why the food work and the offshore work in this practice resemble each other more than either resembles a house call.
Graduate is SQF credentialed — what does that mean, and what does it not?
Safe Quality Food is administered by the SQF Institute, a division of FMI, and it is benchmarked against the Global Food Safety Initiative. Its codes now run to Edition 10 and cover manufacturing, storage and distribution, packaging, primary production and more, across thousands of certified sites worldwide. Certification is granted after audit by a licensed certification body, and a certified site is required to have a qualified SQF practitioner.
Why a supplier cares is commercial rather than regulatory. A GFSI-benchmarked certificate is what many retail and manufacturing buyers accept in place of running their own supplier audits. The certificate is, in effect, what keeps the supplier on the shelf — which means an audit finding is not a paperwork problem, it is a customer problem.
Pest management is one of the prerequisite programs an SQF auditor opens. What gets examined is the documentation trail described above, plus the chemical documentation, the qualifications of the people doing the work, and whether last cycle’s corrective actions were actually closed.
Graduate is SQF credentialed and services SQF-audited food manufacturing facilities under contract. And here is the boundary, which matters because it is routinely blurred by firms selling into this market: SQF certifies sites, not pest control companies. Graduate does not hold, and does not claim, a facility certificate of its own. Any contractor telling a plant it is “SQF certified” as a service business has misread the scheme, and a quality manager who knows the code will notice.
There is history behind the fit rather than a certificate chase. The food-safety pest program this firm built in the mid-1990s turned out to align closely with what the scheme later asked for. The standard codified good practice; the good practice was already the method. Where that work sits in the wider practice is described under commercial and compliance work.
Why does a pest control firm hold TWIC, HUET and Tier 1 offshore?
Because some of the work happens on assets you cannot simply drive up to, and the credentials that get you onto those assets have nothing to do with pest control and everything to do with whether the job can be bid at all.
TWIC — the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, issued by the Transportation Security Administration with the US Coast Guard. It is required under the Maritime Transportation Security Act for access to secure areas of the nation’s maritime facilities and vessels. Obtaining one means in-person enrollment, fingerprints and a facial photograph, documentary proof of identity and status, a fee, and a TSA security threat assessment — a federal background check. The card is valid for five years, and TSA advises enrolling at least sixty days before it is needed.
The commercial logic is the cleanest on this page. Without a TWIC, a contractor inside a secure terminal has to be physically escorted by facility staff at every moment. Almost no terminal will staff that for a pest inspection, which means a firm without the credential is not competing for the work on price or method — it is not competing at all.
HUET — helicopter underwater escape training. Offshore platforms and rigs are reached by helicopter over water, and current escape training is a condition of boarding the aircraft. It is trained practically, in a simulator, and refreshed on a schedule. Tier 1 offshore is also held.
Neither of these says anything about competence with rodents, and neither is presented here as though it did. What they say is that this practice has spent years working in environments where access is controlled, materials are logged, documentation is checked before work starts and improvisation is not available. That standard then arrives unchanged at a co-op cellar in Manhattan, which is the actual argument for listing them.
What is RelyOn, and why is a platform on a credentials list?
RelyOn Nutec is a global safety and competence training business, headquartered in Copenhagen, working across safety-critical industries. Alongside training delivery it runs digital systems that track workforce training, compliance and competence.
It appears here because it is the verification layer for the offshore and industrial credentials above. An operator checking a contractor at a gate or a heliport does not want a laminated card and a claim; it wants a live record it can query. That is what the platform provides, and it is how those credentials are actually checked in the field.
The boundary is straightforward: RelyOn is a training and verification platform, not a certifying body for pest management, and nothing about pest control competence follows from being on it. It is included because a page about verification that left out the mechanism of verification would be an odd page.
NPMA and NYPMA: what does membership buy, and what does it not prove?
This is the section where most firms quietly promote a membership into something it is not, so it is worth being blunt.
Membership is not certification. Nobody sat an examination for it. The National Pest Management Association, founded in 1933 and now representing thousands of member companies, asks for a valid license in the member’s own locality, dues, and adherence to its code of conduct and its anti-trust, anti-harassment and inclusivity policies. The New York Pest Management Association is the state half, and its member companies join both associations together.
What membership genuinely buys is worth having, and it is practical rather than decorative:
Technical resources — pest identification support, research reports, published guidelines, and model contract language that a compliance program can be checked against.
Continuing education — training accepted for credit across more than forty states and provinces, and, through NYPMA, DEC-certified training carrying the recertification credits a New York certified applicator needs to stay current. That is the mechanism by which C1822141 remains valid, which makes this the least glamorous and most load-bearing membership benefit on the list.
Access to association staff entomologists, which matters on an unusual identification.
Legislative and regulatory tracking, giving early sight of a rule change rather than late notice of one. In a state that has produced neighbor notification rules, local pesticide notification law and building-code obligations that all touch this trade, that is a working benefit rather than a perk.
And what it does not prove: it says nothing examined about the competence of the people doing the work at your building. This site therefore keeps memberships in a separate group from certifications everywhere they appear, including in its structured data, where a membership is recorded against the company as a membership and never against a person as a credential. That distinction is invisible to a reader and obvious to a machine, which is precisely why it is worth getting right.
Teaching abroad, and why it belongs on this list
Every other item on this page was awarded by a body that examines people. This one was awarded by rooms full of working practitioners who chose whom to ask.
Ryan Katz teaches rodent work and exclusion for the Mexican pest management association, ACPUB, including at its regional congress in Querétaro, where he also helped set up and run a rodent safari taking more than 100 association members into the field rather than keeping them in a lecture hall. He teaches for the PestInsight Initiative in Nigeria, on the same subject, to another professional audience. He is an invited speaker on rodent exclusion in the United States.
The reason this counts as a credential rather than a biography note is what an invitation of that kind actually represents. A national association selecting an instructor for its own members is making a technical judgment about a method, in public, with its members’ time at stake. It is not marketing, it cannot be purchased, and there is no application form.
There is a second-order benefit that returns directly to clients here, and it is the reason this sits among the credentials rather than under a photograph. Teaching forces a method to become explicit. Handing a technique to a room of practitioners who work on buildings you have never seen means you cannot lean on pattern recognition — you have to state the principle, say why it holds, name the substrate it fails on, and explain how to check the result afterwards. Every pass through that exercise separates the parts of a method that are genuinely transferable from the parts that were only ever habit.
No year is published for any of these engagements, for the same reason no unsupplied number is published: the dates have not been confirmed, and a date that is roughly right is a fabrication with better manners.
How to check every claim on this page
None of the following requires our cooperation, which is the point of listing it.
The two New York numbers. Take business registration 03298 and certified applicator C1822141 to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The categories on the applicator record should read 7A, 7F and 8.
PCQI and HACCP. Ask to see the training documentation. Under the preventive controls rule that documentation is required to exist, with dates and named individuals, so a request for it is a normal request rather than an awkward one.
SQF. Ask which certified sites are serviced and ask the site’s quality manager. A pest program is examined at audit, so the plant has a first-hand view of whether ours holds up.
TWIC. It is verified by the facility at the point of access. There is no more direct test of a security credential than the gate it is presented at.
Offshore training records. Held on the RelyOn platform, which is the record operators check.
The memberships. Both associations will confirm a member company directly.
What to ask any pest control contractor
If this page is useful beyond our own file, it is because the same five questions can be put to anybody bidding against us.
Who specifically is making the diagnosis, and what is that person’s qualification? Not the firm’s qualification — the individual’s, by name.
What is your applicator license number and which categories does it cover? Then check whether the categories actually cover the work being proposed.
What does your certification require, and when does it renew? A holder who cannot describe the renewal burden of their own credential is telling you something.
Show me a service record from twelve months ago. How a firm documents an ordinary visit predicts exactly how it will document a bad quarter.
What will you not do? Every honest practice has a boundary. A contractor with no boundary at all is describing a sales position rather than a license.
Where to start
If you are assembling a vendor file, everything above is verifiable today and the numbers are printed in full for that purpose. If you are earlier than that and simply want to know how the work is approached, the practitioner’s own account is on Ryan Katz, the regulatory pages sit under commercial and compliance work, and the two disciplines this practice is built on are set out under rodent control and structural exclusion.
The consultation is free, and most cases can be narrowed considerably on a phone call before anybody visits a site.
The register, item by item
The same information as above, set out so it can be read in a column and dropped into a file. Each entry states what the thing required, what it takes to keep, what it lets us do, and what it is not.
PCQI Preventive Controls Qualified Individual
Individual certification · held by Ryan Katz
Issued by
A role defined by FDA under FSMA at 21 CFR 117.180; Ryan Katz’s training certificate is issued by AIB International
What it required
Training in the development and application of risk-based preventive controls at least equivalent to a standardized curriculum recognized as adequate by FDA, or job experience giving at least equivalent knowledge. The training itself has to be documented: date, type, and who was trained. Ryan Katz completed AIB International’s PCQI Online 2.0, fifteen contact hours, in December 2025.
What it lets us do
A PCQI does or oversees the food safety plan, validation of preventive controls, the review of monitoring and corrective-action records, and reanalysis of the plan — and the rule states plainly that this person need not be an employee of the facility.
What it is not
Holding PCQI does not make Graduate the plant’s PCQI of record, and it does not turn a pest program into a preventive control. It means the pest side of the plan can be written, defended and reviewed in the language the plan is already written in.
AIB International, against the framework set out by the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and published by FDA
What it required
Working command of the seven principles — hazard analysis, critical control point identification, critical limits, monitoring, corrective actions, verification, and record-keeping and documentation. Ryan Katz completed AIB International’s HACCP Online course, nine contact hours, in November 2025; the certificate carries the HACCP Alliance seal.
What it lets us do
Pest control is a prerequisite program sitting underneath a HACCP plan, so the program has to be documented well enough to survive being read as part of it rather than filed beside it.
What it is not
HACCP is a system a facility operates, not a license a contractor holds. What Graduate brings to it is a pest program built to be auditable inside it.
Transportation Security Administration, with the US Coast Guard
What it required
In-person enrollment, fingerprints and a facial photograph, proof of identity and immigration status, a fee, and a TSA security threat assessment — a federal background check. The card runs for five years.
What it takes to keep
Renewal every five years, with a fresh security threat assessment. TSA advises enrolling at least sixty days before the card is needed.
What it lets us do
It is required under the Maritime Transportation Security Act for access to secure areas of the nation’s maritime facilities and vessels. Without one, a contractor has to be escorted by facility staff at every moment on site — which most terminals will not staff, so the work cannot realistically be bid at all.
What it is not
A TWIC is an access credential. It says nothing about pest management competence and is never presented here as though it did.
RelyOn Nutec, to the OPITO-approved standard — Helicopter Underwater Escape Training with Compressed Air Emergency Breathing System, OPITO 5295
What it required
Practical training in escaping a helicopter that has ditched and inverted in water, carried out in a simulator, alongside the wider offshore survival syllabus. The compressed air emergency breathing system element is assessed rather than attended: the certificate records that the candidate met the learning outcomes.
What it takes to keep
The certificate runs four years and expires 16 December 2029, after which the assessment is retaken. Operators may also require refreshers on their own schedule.
What it lets us do
Offshore platforms and rigs are reached by helicopter over water, and nobody boards that aircraft without current escape training. It is the difference between being able to service an offshore asset and only being able to quote for one.
What it is not
HUET is a survival credential, not a pest management one. Tier 1 offshore is also held.
SQF Institute, a division of FMI, benchmarked against the Global Food Safety Initiative
What it required
For a site: a documented system audited by a licensed certification body against the SQF code for its sector, with a qualified SQF practitioner on staff. For a pest management provider working inside one: a program whose device maps, service records, trend analysis, corrective actions and chemical documentation stand up to that audit unedited.
What it lets us do
A GFSI-benchmarked certificate is what many retail and manufacturing buyers accept in place of running their own supplier audits, so the certificate is what keeps a supplier on the shelf. The pest program is one of the prerequisite programs the auditor opens, and a weak one costs the site findings on an audit it cannot afford to fail.
What it is not
SQF certifies sites, not pest control companies. Graduate is SQF credentialed and services SQF-audited food manufacturing facilities under contract; it does not hold, and does not claim, a facility certificate of its own.
RelyOn Nutec, a global safety and competence training business headquartered in Copenhagen
What it required
That the underlying training is actually completed and recorded. The platform holds the record; it does not substitute for the course.
What it lets us do
An operator checking a contractor at the gate or the heliport can verify current offshore and industrial compliance training against a live record rather than a laminated card, which is how access is granted on assets that will not take a paper claim.
What it is not
RelyOn is a training and verification platform, not a certifying body for pest management. It is listed here because it is how the offshore credentials above are checked.
Trade association membership · held by Graduate Pest Control, Inc.
The association
National Pest Management Association, founded 1933, Fairfax, Virginia
What it required
A valid license to operate in the company’s own locality, dues, and adherence to the association’s code of conduct and its anti-trust, anti-harassment and inclusivity policies.
What it lets us do
It buys access to the industry’s technical apparatus — pest identification support, research reports and guidelines, model contract language, continuing education accepted across more than forty states and provinces, and legislative tracking that gives early sight of a rule change rather than late notice of it.
What it is not
Membership is a company affiliation and an indicator of engagement with the trade. It is not a certification of competence, nobody sat an examination for it, and it is never emitted as a credential in this site’s structured data.
Trade association membership · held by Graduate Pest Control, Inc.
The association
New York Pest Management Association
What it required
Membership of the national association alongside the state one — NYPMA member companies join both — plus dues and adherence to the association’s standards of conduct and ethics.
What it lets us do
It is the New York-specific half: DEC-certified training that carries the recertification credits a certified applicator needs to stay current, access to association staff entomologists, and representation in Albany when state pesticide rules are being written.
What it is not
A state trade association membership is not a state license. The license is C1822141, issued by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and it is the license that governs what may be done at a property.
The other entries on this page were awarded by a body that examines people. This one was awarded by rooms full of working practitioners who chose whom to ask.
Mexico
Mexican pest management association (ACPUB) — Spoke at the ACPUB Congreso Regional in Querétaro, and helped set up and run a rodent safari taking over 100 association members into the field for hands-on instruction.
Nigeria
PestInsight Initiative — Speaking and teaching on rodent work and exclusion.
United States
Invited speaker on rodent exclusion.
Years are not published for these engagements. They have not been confirmed, and an approximate date presented as a fact is still an invention.
Press and recognition
Where Ryan Katz has been quoted as the source rather than advertised as a supplier. A reporter deciding whom to call is a judgement made by somebody with nothing to sell.
Three ways to get rid of mosquitoes in your garden this summer, and a common myth
News 12 Long Island1 July 2026Billed as a pest management expert with Graduate Pest Control
Walked the reporter’s own yard identifying breeding sites — plant saucers, mulch, gutters, tarps, bird baths — and made the case that the mosquitoes biting you were almost certainly bred on the property rather than blown in from next door. A bottle cap of standing water is enough, and a week of it produces larvae.
It is the argument this site makes on every mosquito page, put to a reporter who came to test it: source reduction first, fogging second, and fogging is worth little while something is still breeding inside the treated area.
Garden Guide: How to get rid of a yellow jacket nest
News 12 Long Island30 July 2025Billed as an expert with Graduate Pest Control in East Northport
Asked to debunk the home remedies for an underground yellow jacket nest — vinegar and baking soda, blocking the entrance, flooding it, diatomaceous earth, late-season traps — and to explain what professional removal actually targets, which is the queen rather than the individual wasps.
A reporter took the removal myths to a practitioner rather than repeating them, and the answers turn on how the nest is built and where the queen sits. That is the same structural reading the rest of this site argues for.
Graduate Pest Control, Inc. is a service-area business covering New York City and Long Island. Certified applicator C1822141 is held in categories 7A, 7F, 8; category 3A, ornamentals and turf, is not held.
Common questions
Is Ryan Katz an entomologist?
No, and this site does not say otherwise. The entomologist at Graduate Pest Control is Arnold Katz, who founded the firm, holds the B.S. in Entomology from the University of Georgia and still works in the field as senior technician and staff entomologist. Ryan Katz is a New York certified applicator and holds PCQI and HACCP certification.
Does NPMA or NYPMA membership certify anything?
No. Both are trade association memberships held by the company, and neither involves an examination. They buy technical resources, model contract language, legislative tracking and, through NYPMA, DEC-certified training that carries recertification credits. This site keeps them separate from the certifications and never records them as credentials in its structured data.
Is Graduate Pest Control SQF certified?
No, and the distinction matters. SQF certifies sites, not pest control companies. Graduate is SQF credentialed and services SQF-audited food manufacturing facilities under contract, which means the pest program is built to survive the audit the site has to pass. Any contractor claiming a facility certificate of its own has misread the scheme.
How can a procurement officer verify all of this independently?
Check pesticide business registration 03298 and certified applicator C1822141 with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. TWIC is verified by the facility at the gate. Offshore training records are held on the RelyOn platform, and the associations confirm membership directly.
What work does Graduate turn down on licensing grounds?
Anything falling under category 3A, ornamentals and turf, which is not held: no planting work, no turf program, no commercial grounds contract. Termite control is not offered at all. Mosquito work sits in category 8, public health, which is held, so it stays in scope while a landscape spray program does not.
Why does teaching abroad appear on a credentials page?
Because it is the one item on the list conferred by peers rather than by an examining body. Mexico's national pest management association and the PestInsight Initiative in Nigeria invited Ryan Katz to teach rodent work and exclusion to their own members, which is a judgment made by practitioners who could have asked anyone, and it is a harder thing to obtain than a badge.
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The consultation is free and most problems can be diagnosed on the phone. A written proposal and plan carries a service fee, and that fee comes off the cost of the work if you go ahead.
