Third-Party Accreditation
Certification is the final link in a process established to educate people in the correct way to perform their assigned job duties. Well-trained employees, with independently verified knowledge and skills, make fewer mistakes—and therefore have fewer accidents—than those with less experience or inferior knowledge.
While certification generally involves some form of testing, not all testing leads to certification. And even though training is clearly essential to a valid certification process, care must be taken to ensure the two functions remain separate. After all, an improperly developed certification program might be worse than no certification at all because it would create a false sense of security among both 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 credentialing authority, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
In 1998, CCO received its initial accreditation from the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), recognizing that CCO programs meet or exceed NCCA’s exacting standards for certification competency. Federal OSHA referenced this accreditation in its formal agreement signed with CCO in 1999.
Over time, a standard for accreditation was established by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and CCO was initially awarded ANSI accreditation in 2007 and then reaccredited by ANSI in 2012 and 2017. Most CCO certification programs—Mobile, Tower, Overhead, Articulating, and Service Truck Crane Operator, Digger Derrick Operator, Signalperson, Rigger Level I, Rigger Level II, Crane Inspector, and Lift Director—are accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) to the ISO/IEC 17024 International Standard for organizations that certify personnel. ANAB requirements are rigorous and designed to give assurance to those who depend on certification programs that the tests are fair, sound, and valid assessments of the knowledge and skills they are intended to measure. The decision of ANAB’s Professional Certification Accreditation Committee to award accreditation came only after exhaustive on-site and field audits of CCO’s management systems and psychometric procedures.
Other government authorities that have conducted independent audits of CCO programs include:
- 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 military personnel serving worldwide
To preserve its status as an independent, impartial testing authority, CCO does not offer training. Certification does, however, 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 it is recognized as psychometrically sound by certification specialists. CCO has met all these criteria.
Key features of CCO certification programs are that they:
- Actively encourage training, yet are separate from it
- Verify that training has been effective
- Were developed in a non-regulatory environment
- Are modeled on ANSI/ASME consensus guidelines
- Meet recognized professional credentialing criteria
- Have participation from all industry sectors
- Are officially recognized by federal OSHA as meeting load handling equipment operator qualifications
- Are accredited by an independent accrediting body (ANAB)