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Certification is essentially
the final link in a process designed to educate
people in the correct way to operate cranes.
Well-trained operators, 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 an independent
accreditating authority, the National Commission
for Certifying Agencies (NCCA). 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
NCCCO 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. NCCCO is the only
national crane operator certification program accredited
by a nationally recognized credentialing authority.
OSHA has referenced this accreditation by NCCA
in its formal agreement signed with NCCCO.
Other authorities that have conducted independent
audits of the NCCCO 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
NCCCO certification for candidate fee reimbursement
under the provisions of the Montgomery GI
Bill of 2000;
- The Department
of Defense, which has approved the NCCCO program
through
its DANTES program
to provide certification to serving military
personnel worldwide.
The NCCA requirements,
though strict, are designed to give assurance
to those who use a program
that the tests are a fair, sound and valid assessment
of the knowledge and skills they are intended
to measure. Among these requirements are that
the certification organization must have
a governing body which includes individuals from
the activity being certified.
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
- is a third-party,
independent evaluation of a crane operator’s
knowledge and skill
- was developed in a non-regulatory environment
- is modeled on ANSI/ASME consensus lines
- meets recognized professional credentialing
criteria
- has participation from all industry sectors
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