The Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS) will stop issuing Construction Related Occupation (CRO) skills cards from the end of March.
The CSCS is phasing out the cards with all those issued since October 2015 due to expire by the end of September 2017.
Around 230,000 CRO cards are currently in circulation and cover a range of ancillary construction roles but, crucially, you don’t need industry-related qualifications to hold one.
Alan O’Neile, head of communications at CSCS, said: “The Construction Leadership Council announced that skills certification card schemes carrying the CSCS logo must only certify those occupations with nationally recognised construction-related qualifications, ie NVQs or approved equivalents.
“The CRO card is issued without the requirement to demonstrate the applicant has achieved an appropriate qualification and as such does not meet the requirements of the CLC.”
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Where I completely agree with the principle of recognised qualifications quickly verifiable on construction sites. I have to say the responsibility of the site managers to “look after” the activities of those industries that fall through the cracks. (We specialise in telescopic seating and there is no qualification for our “trade” we have been deemed as non-construction related by the CITB. Although sixty percent of our work is carried out on construction sites!) To think that this is practical is naive at best, it’s probably completely unworkable in practice!
I agree with Graham, we have people who hold both CPCS cards and also the white CRO cards for certain skills that are expected by our clients, yet are not covered by either CSCS or CPCS. An example of this is gabion wall installer or road sweeper. More thought needs to be put into replacing / assessment for these cards rather than just scrapping them
I agree with the above, we are a plant hire company and looking for a CSCS card for our road sweeper drivers, however the CRO card is being scrapped. To be replaced with an NVQ which is not even related to the road weeper occupation, “Road Recycling machine”! Yet our customers want our operatives to hold a CSCS card or similar! Help what can we do!?
I may be missing something here.
The CSCS card didn’t demonstrate that I was an Architect, as the process wasn’t capable of grasping that my qualifications were from outside the EU, and therefore unrecognised. No one ever asked me for it anyway, and such testing process to get the card was (for my work) irrelevant.
How does having any card then demonstrate any level of qualification?