Posted By Nigel We are looking at defining competency for safety critical jobs and some are easier than others e.g we can say all locations will have at least one person qualified to say Nebosh Nat Cert , manual handling trainers will be both trained trainers and have undergone accredited external manual handling training. Then we get to maintenance - all staff who undertake this have the appropriate pieces of paper e.g. city & guilds , but what about their managers / supervisors who will hand out the work or employ contractors ? - do we need e.g electrical engineers (do they need to do CPD?) we rely on these people to know the regulations etc , but a recent incident indicated this was not the case. How do any of you address this ? All advice welcomed.

Posted By garyh An interesting one this. I have now got a "Competence" validation scheme going on site as part of our COMAH process. I think it is important to differentiate between "trained" and "competent". Essentially, being trained isn't enough; you need to be able to DEMONSTRATE that the training is being put into action. Many people think that "trained" = "competent", and this is not necessarily so.