Masters and Doctorate Routes in Decision 4 of 2007
October 9, 2026
11 min read
DITEC Experts, Radiation Protection Team, ALDuha Institute for Training and Environmental Consulting
One word that turns an entry into two entries
One point before anything else. Meeting the conditions in the Decision is what you can prepare for. Whether a licence is granted, and when, is a decision of the competent authority alone, and nothing in this explanation and nothing in any course is a commitment that a licence will be granted or that it will be granted within a given period. What this article does is set out the condition as the instrument states it and point to the training that bears on it.
The industrial entries transcribed in this explanation, items 13 to 17, are each a single cumulative list of conditions, save that item 13 sets two such lists under its two numbered limbs. Items 11 and 12 are neither. Each of them is two lists, and the two lists are separated by nothing more than the Arabic word for or followed by a colon, written at the end of a condition rather than on a line of its own. That typographical smallness is the practical problem this page addresses, because a reader who skims an entry of five or six bullet points and takes them as one cumulative list has read a requirement that neither entry imposes.
The consequence of misreading it runs in both directions and both are expensive. A reader who takes the whole entry as one list requires of a candidate a degree he does not need, or an experience period that is in the other route, and declines a person who may be eligible. A reader who notices the division but then treats the two routes as graded, one higher and one lower, has supplied an ordering the entries do not state, and he will present a file on the route he thinks is easier rather than on the route whose conditions his candidate actually meets.
This page does one thing. It sets the four routes of the two entries out as four lists, says what is written identically across them and what is not, and states the one difference that has the clearest practical effect: an experience condition is present on both masters routes and is absent from both doctorate routes. It does not tell you which route is better, because the entries do not say.
One point of orientation before the conditions themselves: they are in the schedule attached to the Decision rather than in the body of it. The preamble records that it was issued having regard to the Executive Regulation and in particular to Article 25 of it, and on the recommendation of the Radiation Protection Committee, and the issuing article does one thing only: the conditions for licences to work in the fields of radiation work, attached to this Decision, shall apply. So a reader who opens the Decision and reads the article that issues it finds a referral and no conditions.
What a route is, in the words of the entries
Both entries open with the cumulative formula this schedule uses. Item 11 opens with the following conditions must be present in the person who is granted a licence to work as a qualified expert in radiation protection and item 12 with the following conditions must be present in the person who is granted a licence to work as a trainer in radiation protection. The formula requires the conditions that follow to be present together in the person who is granted the licence.
Then, in each entry, a group of conditions is followed by a condition whose text ends with the word for or and a colon, and then a second group begins. In item 11 the hinge sits at the end of the experience condition: that he have practical experience in the field of radiation protection of not less than five years, followed by the word or and a colon. In item 12 it sits in the same position: that he have practical experience in the field of training, academic experience, of not less than one year, followed by the word or and a colon.
What that word does structurally is what this page calls a route: the conditions before it are required together, and the conditions after it are required together, and the two groups are joined by an alternative rather than added to each other. We use route as our own descriptive label for convenience and the entries do not use it; neither entry numbers its groups, gives them headings, or says in so many words that a candidate satisfies the entry by satisfying one group. What the entries show is the alternative and the two groups, and we describe exactly that.
Note what the hinge is not. It is not a heading, it is not numbered, and it is not set on its own line: in the copy we hold it is two characters at the end of a condition that is itself a substantive requirement. So an entry can be read end to end by a careful person who never registers that it divided. That is a feature of the drafting and it is the reason this page exists.
The four routes as four lists
The table sets out the four routes of items 11 and 12 as four lists. It is a reading of those two items, both quoted in full on the Arabic version of these articles, and nothing is added to it. Read it down a column to see one route whole, and across a row to see where the four part. It does not rank the routes.
The four routes of items 11 and 12
| Condition | Expert, masters | Expert, doctorate | Trainer, masters | Trainer, doctorate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic level | The second university degree, masters in brackets | The third university degree, doctorate in brackets | The second university degree, masters in brackets | The third university degree, doctorate in brackets |
| The test on the speciality | A speciality that suits the nature of the work | The same wording | The same wording | The same wording |
| The fields named after the particle of likeness | Engineering and physics with its branches | Nuclear or radiation sciences | Nuclear or radiation sciences | Nuclear or radiation sciences |
| The phrase at minimum | Appears | Does not appear | Appears | Does not appear |
| Total of courses | Radiation protection courses totalling not less than three months | Radiation protection courses totalling not less than one month | The same wording as the expert masters route | The same wording as the expert doctorate route |
| Experience: present or absent | Present | No experience condition in this route | Present | No experience condition in this route |
| Experience: what it is tied to and the period | Practical experience in the field of radiation protection, not less than five years | Not applicable on this route | Practical experience in the field of training, with academic experience in brackets, not less than one year | Not applicable on this route |
| Source of the courses | The route says nothing about it | The route says nothing about it | The route says nothing about it | The route says nothing about it |
| Prescribed medical examination | Does not appear in the entry | Does not appear in the entry | Does not appear in the entry | Does not appear in the entry |
| Conditions in the route | Three | Two | Three | Two |
What the absent experience condition does and does not allow you to say
The row that will do the most work in a real file is the experience row, so it is worth separating what can be said from what cannot. What can be said is a matter of transcription: the masters route of item 11 names practical experience in the field of radiation protection of not less than five years, the masters route of item 12 names practical experience in the field of training of not less than one year, and neither doctorate route contains an experience condition at all. Each of those statements is a comparison of transcribed wording with transcribed wording inside the entry concerned.
What cannot be said is everything that adds a reason or an order to those facts. We do not say that the entries treat a doctorate as standing in place of experience, because neither entry gives a reason for anything and a reader may not supply one. We do not say that a doctorate route is the quicker or the easier route, because that is an ordering and the entries place their routes in no order. And we do not say that a person on a doctorate route will not be asked about experience, because that is a statement about what the competent authority will do and the grant of a licence is its decision alone.
There is a further thing the absence does, and it is the most useful consequence on this page because it is structural rather than interpretive. The provision that allows a trainee licence works by excepting one condition. The third part of the schedule provides for that situation: a licence to practise radiation work as a trainee is granted to a person in whom the conditions of the licence sought are present with the exception of the experience condition, and then in that case he may not practise radiation work except under the supervision of a licensed person. So the exception named in the wording is the experience condition, every other condition in the entry still has to be present, and the practice is under the supervision of a licensed person. What the provision reaches in a particular case is a question for the Ministry. On a masters route there is an experience condition for that exception to reach. On a doctorate route, as the entries stand, there is no experience condition in the entry. What the provision reaches there is a question for the Ministry, and it is not one a reader settles by subtracting a condition that was never there.
A note on a condition that is absent, and it is the place on this page where a reader is most likely to take more from the text than it carries. The prescribed medical examination appears as a condition of its own in items 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 as transcribed in this explanation. It does not appear in item 11 or in item 12, on either route of either entry. That is the whole of what we record. We do not call it an exemption, because an exemption is something an instrument grants and these entries say nothing. We do not say the examination is not required of a person seeking one of these two licences, because an entry that is silent has not spoken and the Law, the Regulation and the conditions of a given licence are not in front of us on this page. And we do not say the absence was intended, because intention is not something a reader may attribute to an instrument. The transcription note in our source file records that the doctorate route of these entries does not mention the examination and that the text is so in the original, so this is not an artefact of our copy. If your own case turns on it, that is precisely the question to put to the Ministry, quoting the entry in full and asking whether the examination is required.
Choosing and documenting a route
Decide the route from the candidate, and decide it once
- The four routes name two academic levels, two sets of fields and two totals of courses, and two of the four contain an experience condition. So the route decides which documents matter, and a file assembled before the route was settled is a file assembled against a guess.
- Where a candidate holds both degrees, present the file on one route deliberately and say in the covering letter which route it is presented on.
Never read the entry as one cumulative list
- The two groups in each entry are joined by the word for or at the end of a condition, not by a heading or a numbered division. Taking the whole entry as one list requires of a candidate conditions that are in the other route, which is how an eligible person is declined.
Keep the course record whichever route you are on
- All four routes contain a course condition stated as a total of months, and the totals differ between the masters and the doctorate routes. The record is therefore the same habit on every route: provider, dates, contact hours and certificate, for every course, from the first.
Put every absence to the Ministry rather than reading it
- Neither entry names the prescribed medical examination, neither doctorate route names experience, and neither entry describes where the courses are to come from. An absence is not a permission and it is not a prohibition, so each one is a question quoting the entry in full.
Questions we are asked about the two routes
Are the conditions in these entries one list or two?
Each entry contains two groups of conditions, and the groups are joined by the Arabic word for or followed by a colon, written at the end of a condition rather than as a heading or a numbered division. The opening formula requires the conditions to be present together, and the alternative word divides what follows it from what precedes it. We describe each group as a route, which is our own label for convenience; the entries do not number or name their groups, and they do not state in so many words that satisfying one group satisfies the entry. If the point is decisive for your file, quote the entry in full in the enquiry and ask the Ministry to confirm how the groups are to be read.
Which route should we present our candidate on?
That is settled by which route's conditions he meets, and it is not settled by which route is shorter. The four routes name two academic levels, two differently named sets of fields, two totals of courses, and an experience condition on two of the four. So read the route whose academic level matches the degree he actually holds, check the fields that route names against his speciality, and then check the course total and, where the route has one, the experience condition. If he meets more than one route, present on one deliberately and say which. We do not advise a route as the better one, because the entries place their routes in no order.
Does the doctorate route mean no experience at all is needed?
What the entries show is that the doctorate route of each contains two conditions, an academic condition and a course condition, and contains no experience condition. That is a statement about the wording of the route. It is not a statement about what the competent authority will require of a particular applicant, which is its decision alone, and it is not a statement that the entry treats the degree as standing in place of experience, because neither entry gives a reason for anything. Present the candidate against the two conditions that route does contain, quote the route in full, and ask what evidence of experience, if any, is expected.
Can a trainee licence be used on a doctorate route?
The third part of the schedule provides for that situation: a licence to practise radiation work as a trainee is granted to a person in whom the conditions of the licence sought are present with the exception of the experience condition, and then in that case he may not practise radiation work except under the supervision of a licensed person. So the exception named in the wording is the experience condition, every other condition in the entry still has to be present, and the practice is under the supervision of a licensed person. What the provision reaches in a particular case is a question for the Ministry. On a masters route there is an experience condition for that exception to reach. On a doctorate route, as the entries stand, the entry contains no experience condition, so what the provision reaches there is a question for the Ministry and not something to be worked out by subtraction. Ask it with the route quoted in full and the candidate's position described.
Is the total of courses the same on both routes?
No. On both masters routes the condition names radiation protection courses totalling not less than three months, and on both doctorate routes it names radiation protection courses totalling not less than one month. The two wordings are otherwise written the same way: both speak of having taken part rather than of passing, both speak of courses in the plural measured by a total, and neither says where the courses are to come from or how the period is counted. So the record you keep is the same habit on every route and only the figure the record has to reach differs.
A technical note: the licence is not the protection
A technical note, and it is the most important passage on this page. The conditions in this Decision are licensing conditions, not site work instructions. Meeting them, and any licence that may follow, replaces nothing in operational protection, and no course makes anyone safe by itself. One rule governs every judgement about where a source is and what is coming off it: it is settled by measurement, never by inference.
The measurement is made by the licensee, through a person qualified to make it, with an instrument within its calibration validity and response-checked before work starts, and the instrument has to respond to the radiation actually present and at the energies present. A meter calibrated on the energies of a gamma source may read far below the truth at the much lower photon energies in a diffraction or fluorescence instrument, or not respond at all. An alpha emitter is not reliably detected by a gamma probe or a beta probe. Where neutron-emitting material may be present, or a beam energy high enough to produce neutrons, a gamma-only meter can read clean beside an unshielded source. And intake, by inhalation or by ingestion, is not something a surface monitor shows at all, so it sits with the air sampling and internal-dose arrangements of the licensee.
What does not count is an inference. Not a mechanical indicator, not a position switch, not a painted mark, not a label on a container, and not the fact that the work went as planned. And for an electrically generated source the rule is not softened but changed. A tube with the supply cut reads clean and establishes nothing about the next minute. What makes the device safe to work on is that the means of switching it on has been taken out of service and kept under the control of the person doing the work. These are obligations on the licensee under the Law, the Regulation and the conditions of his own licence, and their place is not this Decision.
These two entries are the ones that license judgement rather than operation, so one thing about their structure has a safety consequence worth naming. A route is a set of conditions on the formation of a person. It is not a statement that a person so formed will be right about a particular source on a particular day.
The rule above holds whoever is standing there and whatever he holds. An opinion that a source is shielded, or that a working position is acceptable, is settled by a measurement. The measurement is made with an instrument that responds to the radiation actually present, at the energies present, within its calibration validity and response-checked before work starts. A qualification does not substitute for that measurement and neither does seniority.
One practical habit follows and it costs nothing. When an opinion is given, record with it the configuration it assumed and the measurements it rested on. A reader months later can then tell whether the thing in front of him is still the thing the opinion was about. Keeping that record is a duty on the licensee under the Law, the Regulation and the conditions of his own licence, and its place is not this Decision.
How the Institute can help
Two findings recur where these two entries are concerned. The first is a file assembled against the whole entry read as one cumulative list, which asks a candidate for a degree level or an experience period that belongs to the other route and ends in an eligible person being declined. The second is a file presented on one route and documented against the other, most often a doctorate candidate whose paperwork is an experience dossier and whose course record stops short of the total the route names.
The Institute delivers radiation protection training, reads a candidate's position against the four routes and says which routes his documents actually answer, builds and maintains the running course record a total of months is evidenced from. It drafts the enquiry to the Ministry on how the two groups in an entry are to be read, on whether a named degree falls inside the fields a given route names, on what the trainee provision reaches where a route contains no experience condition and on whether the prescribed medical examination is expected where neither entry names it. A word on the limits of what the Institute issues. The entries read here name no particular course, so neither a course nor a certificate is offered on this page as answering their condition, and the Institute does not state that any programme of its own satisfies a condition that names a total of months. What the Institute delivers is radiation protection training; what a given certificate or a given set of courses does against a given condition is for the Ministry to say, and the Institute does not issue academic degrees of any level, which is the other half of every route in these two entries.
Scope of what the Institute does: training and consulting. Field radiation surveys are carried out through specialist partners. The Institute does not carry out laboratory analysis, instrument calibration or equipment testing.
A note on three wordings of the course condition, and it is the single most useful distinction in this batch. The items transcribed in this explanation do not state the course condition in one way. Item 13, in both its limbs, and item 14 require that he pass a radiation protection officer course in industrial applications from an approved centre. Items 15, 16 and 17 require a training course in radiation protection in industrial applications from an approved centre, item 15 writing it with an additional phrase rendered here as in the field of. And items 11 and 12, the two industrial entries this batch reads, require something written differently again: that he have taken part in radiation protection courses totalling not less than three months on one route and that he have taken part in radiation protection courses totalling not less than one month on the other. The third wording is not a narrower or a wider version of the first two. It is a different kind of condition: it speaks of having taken part rather than of passing, it speaks of courses in the plural with a total duration rather than of one named course, and it names no subject beyond radiation protection. We record the three wordings and we do not resolve them: we do not say that a certificate answering one answers another, we do not place them in an order, and we do not say what any particular certificate does against any particular condition, because the items do not say. What follows practically is narrow and worth acting on: read which wording your own entry uses, and put the question of whether a particular certificate or a particular set of courses satisfies it to the Ministry in the words of the item, in writing, before a course is paid for.
A note on the source of the courses in these two entries. Items 13, 14, 15 and 17, as transcribed in this explanation, describe the centre a course is to come from with an Arabic word this explanation renders as approved, and item 16 carries that description on one of its two courses and not on the other. Items 11 and 12 carry no such description at all: the course condition on each of their routes names the courses and says nothing about where they are to come from. Silence in an instrument is neither a permission nor a prohibition, so we record it and we read it neither way. In particular we do not say that the absence of the description means any provider will do, and we do not say that the description is to be read into the entry from its neighbours. Our practical reading is to name the courses and their providers in the enquiry and to ask in the words of the item, because what the instrument leaves open the competent authority settles. The English word is a rendering chosen for this explanation and is not a term of art. The Institute is a licensed training provider and describes itself that way and no other way.
A note on the authority. The transcribed preamble of the Decision refers to the Executive Regulation issued by decision of the President of the Supreme Council for the Environment and Natural Reserves, number 4 of 2003, and it does not state who issued Decision 4 of 2007. So this explanation does not say that body issued it, and its name appears nowhere in this explanation outside a verbatim quotation but in this note. The authority addressed today is the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, and the unit concerned is named in the organisational decisions as the Radiation Protection Department; that is an administrative statement about who is addressed now and it is not offered as a reading of the Decision. In the Institute's own advice the authority is written as the Ministry.
This explanation is published for awareness by the radiation protection team at ALDuha Institute for Training and Environmental Consulting. The English text is an explanation, not an official translation: the Arabic text published in the Official Gazette governs in case of any difference, and the official Arabic wording of every condition discussed here is quoted in full on the Arabic version of this article. This explanation is introductory. It is not a legal opinion, it does not replace the conditions of your own licence, and it does not replace review by the regulator. Last updated 9 October 2026.