It's a great question, and it shows aaronjumps is serious about being an excellent carpet & upholstery tech.
Here's another perspective on purchasing / studying the standard, fwiw:
Consider the
ISO 9001 quality standard. Don't worry about it if you don't know what it is - however, you've probably seen the signs and flags outside of manufacturing companies with "ISO 9001 Certified," right? A company gets ISO 9001 certification to show they are compliant with an international quality management system standard. You can purchase and download said standard for $139. I'm not saying you should. Just that you can.
If you were to stand at the work entrance of such an ISO 9001 certified company having 100 employees or more at the start of each shift and ask each employee entering if they own a copy of that ISO standard (not even asking them if they ever bothered to read it), guess what the percentage who own a copy would be? Less than 1%. Now think about that.
Only upper management, would have a copy, and that might be limited to the one person whose responsibility it was to get the certification in the first place. And the auditors would just use the company's copy, if at all. They wouldn't own it. They would likely just have checklists the company made up for them.
So what about all the employees? They're trained to perform their job optimally. They don't need the standard for that. They just need their work instructions.
Oh, there may be 1 in 10,000 who buy it because they are intellectually curious and have nothing better to do. But it's not necessary.
The approach that is used among such companies amounts to "Just do your job properly and the company will be compliant with the standard - we've seen to that."
Personally, when I got my first several
IICRC certifications:
CCT, UPT, WDR, etc... I bought the standards. They sat in a file box on my truck. I never used them. But I was proud I had them. At least, for a few years. And I told myself I was supporting the
IICRC. I don't think I wrote them off my taxes (LOL). As my company grew, I never showed them to my employees. I sent each employee to get
IICRC certified. I think that's important.
But owning the Standard? Nah.
FWIW
Oh, and if the Standard were free, yeah we'd probably all download it because we all want FREE. And it sounds "important." But would it change anything in a tangible or practical way in our company or how we clean? Nope. Not really.