Getting started

1. Watch a short tutorial

   Free · 2 minutes to 3 hours

   The tutorials are videos that introduce STAMP, STPA, and CAST. The short examples take a few minutes and show what an analysis looks like on an aircraft, a car, or a drone.

   Free tutorials

2. Attend the free MIT STAMP Workshop

   Free · online or in person

   Practitioners from industry and government talk about what the methods found in their systems and how long the work took. You can see whether the methods would work on problems like yours, and meet people who already use them.

   MIT STAMP Workshop

3. Read the handbook

   Free · self-paced

   The STPA and CAST handbooks walk through every step of each method with examples from many industries. It helps to read them with the two guides to common mistakes, linked below, before you start an analysis of your own.

   Handbooks · Common mistakes using STAMP (PDF) · Common mistakes in STPA and CAST (PDF)

4. Take a class

   Online · hands-on

   When you're ready to apply STPA to your own system, a class gives you practice with feedback. The online classes are built around hands-on exercises, so you can find and fix common mistakes on an example before they show up in a real project.

   Online classes

5. Present at the workshop

   Proposal · reviewed

   If you've applied one of the methods, you can present what you found. Reviewers give feedback on your proposal, and the audience is full of people who have done similar work. Talks go into the public archive, where others can find and cite them.

   Call for presentations

6. Get certified

   Project · formal evaluation

   The STPA Practitioner Certificate shows that you can apply the method to a real problem. It requires completing a small project and passing a formal evaluation against established criteria.

   STPA Practitioner Certificate

Before your first analysis

The tutorials and workshop teach you the basic terms and show you plenty of examples. That's enough to follow workshop talks and decide whether the methods are right for you. Doing a good analysis of a real system takes practice, as with any engineering method.

Without that practice, it's easy to miss steps on a first project, and then the results can make it look as if the method didn't work. A 2026 workshop talk described an audit of a disappointing government-funded STPA effort. The audit found that the analysis had been done incorrectly and incompletely. The project had no facilitator, no training, and no implementation plan. If you're planning a project of your own, reading the handbook and taking a class beforehand will help make the time you spend on it worthwhile.