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Certification is essentially
the final link in a process designed to educate
people in the correct way to operate, signal and rig cranes.
Well-trained personnel, with independently verified
knowledge and skills, make less mistakes, and
therefore have fewer accidents, than those with
less or inferior knowledge.
However, while certification
generally involves some form of testing, not
all testing qualifies
as certification. For example, while training
is clearly essential to a valid certification
process, care must be taken to ensure the two
functions remain separate. And an improperly
developed certification may be worse than no
certification at all, creating a false sense
of security both among those who have it, and
those who rely on it for hiring purposes.
Fortunately,
industry guidelines for professional certification
have been established by two independent
credentialing authorities, the National Commission
for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
NCCA is an
independent non-profit organization set up
by the National
Organization for Competency Assurance (NOCA)
to establish industry guidelines for professional
certifying organizations. In April 1998, NCCCO
received its first five-year accreditation
from NCCA,
recognizing that the
CCO program meets or exceeds NCCA's exacting
standards for certification competency. NCCCO’s
2004 application for re-accreditation was approved
for another five years by NCCA in April. NCCCO
is accredited through 2009. OSHA has referenced this accreditation by NCCA
in its formal agreement signed with NCCCO in 1999.
NCCCO was awarded accreditation by the American National standards Institute (ANSI) in 2007.
The CCO crane operator certification programs - Mobile Crane Operator, Tower Crane Operator and Overhead Operator - are accredited by ANSI to the ISO/IEC 17024 International Standard for organizations that certify personnel.
The decision of ANSI's Professional Certification Accreditation Committee to award accreditation came after rigorous onsite and field audits by ANSI assessors of NCCCO's management systems and psychometric procedures.
NCCCO is the only national crane operator certification program accredited by two nationally recognized accrediting authorities.
Other authorities that have conducted independent
audits of the CCO certification program include:
- The National
Skill Standards Board (NSSB), which has officially
recognized NCCCO
through its Certification Recognition Program;
- The Department
of Education, on behalf of the Department of
Veterans Affairs, which
has qualified
CCO certification for candidate fee reimbursement
under the provisions of the Montgomery GI
Bill of 2000;
- The Department
of Defense, which has approved the CCO program
through
its DANTES program
to provide certification to serving military
personnel worldwide.
The NCCA requirements are rigorous and designed to give assurance to those who use a certification program that the tests are a fair, sound and valid assessment of the knowledge and skills they are intended to measure.
To preserve its
status as an independent, impartial testing
authority, NCCCO does not offer training.
However, it does provide an objective means
of verifying that training has been effective-that
learning has, in fact, taken place. Only third-party,
independent certification can do this, and
then
only if it has been validated by the industry
it is intended for, and recognized as psychometrically
sound by certification specialists. NCCCO has
met all these criteria.
The key elements of the NCCCO program are that
it:
- actively encourages training, yet
is separate from it
- verifies that training
has been effective
- was developed in a non-regulatory environment
- is modeled on ANSI/ASME consensus guidelines
- meets recognized professional credentialing criteria
- has participation from all industry sectors
- is officially recognized by federal OSHA as meeting crane operators qualifications
- is accredited by independent accrediting bodies (ANSI and NCCA)
 
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