The acid test for competance will only come about when you are standing in a court, justifying your actions, after an accident/incident.

As there is no 'licence' as such, I would use an accredited external training provider. This will give independant and impartial decisions on competance. Operators can use equipment all their life, using the wrong and dangerous prectice, without any incident.

It may be possible to set up internal refresher training with the assistance of the training provider, although I personally would still want the back up of the external training certificate.

Sorry - what do you mean training provided by "the customer" - are you an employment agency solely supplying labour?

In previous employments we had in-house training for direct employees (licence system) and a complete ban on non-licenced crane operators - including the Allianz inspector. and various maintenance staff, all works planned with a designated and trained employee

You need to ensure your paid staff are safe at the premises of work - if there is unfamiliar equipment you need to agree with the client how these "temporary" staff will be deemed competenet to operate their equipment at their premises.

Whilst there may be many H&S professionals, practitioners and barrack room lawyers on social media platforms this is the iosh discussion forum - posters come here seeking answers, debate and discussion from the profession on their unique identifiable platform.

It would make for a very poor forum if every post got the "I'll check the ****** group" or "have you checked with the ***** group on *****"

The other problem with Social Media is everyone has an opinion they will readily share and not necessarily backed up with any personal knowledge, information or experience - too many news articles where SM ignorance and personal emotion has had very negative impact upon individuals, organisations and society in general.

Originally Posted by: balmer22

There are currently a number of operators within my organisation who are not trained to use gantry cranes or pendulum hoists. The training in the past has been delivered in house by the customer we work for but its proving difficult to arrange. What has been suggested, by an external trainer used previously is that training coiuld be delivered by a supervisor using the SOP. I dont feel like this meets any requirments for being a competent person to deliver the training. Am I correct? does this need somone with specific expertise or trainig to deliver?

In the past we have qualified our operators to at least CPCS crane operator level and also to NVQ level 3.  We always use customer cranes (Power Stations) and will always receive familiarisation training from the customer (SAP for example) so the guys are familiar with the controls travel path speed etc.  There are specific training course for OHGC from RTITB, Falck etc which we also did but found our customer looking for CPCS and CSCS cards for operators and skilled technicians (which I think was always a little misguided as the tech skill would not be used on construction sites (unless building a power plant) and the only time the use mobile cranes is on out door units and we never use tower cranes.

The crane operation itself is not a big deal the focus however, should be on the slinging and rigging elements which is what the bulk of the OHGC training covers.