Qualifications, and Who Checks
Requiring that somebody hold a qualification is an ordinary condition of engagement, and checking it is work that somebody in your business has to actually do.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Training is the instrument most often used without anybody noticing what it moves.
Requiring that somebody hold a qualification is an ordinary condition of engagement, no different from requiring any other property of the service. Checking that they do is work somebody in your business has to actually do, and it is routinely nobody's job.
The practical issue in “Qualifications, and Who Checks” becomes clearer when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. Used for employee monitoring software with screenshots, see the published Monitask information can add time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential interpretation receives human review.
This article is mostly about the checking, because the requiring is the easy part.
For another operational perspective on “Qualifications, and Who Checks”, consult ClickUp productivity articles. Compare it with the actual statement of work, jurisdiction and supplier relationship before adopting a general practice.
Why it belongs at the front
A qualification required for the work is a condition of being engaged at all, not something to be arranged afterwards. Stating it in the invitation to quote means the suppliers who cannot meet it do not quote.
Discovering it in week three produces the worst available outcome: either the work stops or somebody decides it does not really matter.
What to ask for
Four things, and vagueness in any of them makes the requirement unenforceable:
- The qualification, named exactly as its issuer names it.
- Whatever reference lets you find it on a register.
- The date it expires, if it does.
- Who in your business is responsible for looking.
Vague requirements — appropriately qualified, suitably experienced — are unverifiable and therefore unenforceable, which means in practice they are not requirements at all.
Checking, rather than collecting
A certificate in a folder is not a check. Several industries have discovered this expensively, because certificates are easy to produce and most registers are searchable in a minute.
Where a public register exists, use it, record the date you looked, and look again when the certificate expires. That is the whole procedure and it takes longer to describe than to do.
Expiry, which is the part that fails
Qualifications lapse. Insurance renews annually. Registrations are suspended. A supplier engaged for three years on the strength of a check done at the start is unchecked for most of that time.
A list with dates on it, reviewed quarterly by somebody whose job it is, costs almost nothing. Businesses that do not have one generally find out at the point where it matters most.
Who holds the obligation
In most places, requirements of this kind attach to whoever is having the work done as well as to whoever is doing it. The idea that the supplier's qualifications are entirely the supplier's problem is widely held and frequently wrong.
What exactly is required of a buyer, and in which trades, differs considerably by jurisdiction and by industry, and it is one of the areas where getting it wrong carries consequences well beyond anything else in this collection.
Paying for somebody's renewal
Covered briefly in the article on training and worth the repetition: paying for a supplier's qualification to be maintained is paying for their business to continue existing.
The clean position is that holding it is their cost and it is priced into what they charge you. The exception is a certification that only your work requires and that has no value to them elsewhere, which is closer to buying equipment for a specific job.
Experience, which cannot be certified
Most of what you actually want is not a qualification. It is having done this before, successfully, for somebody who will say so.
References and samples are the instruments for that, and they are underused because they take an afternoon. A single conversation with a previous client tells you more than any certificate, and it is the cheapest form of selection available — which matters particularly here, because selection is the substitute for the development you cannot do.
The supplier who subcontracts
If your supplier sends somebody else, every requirement in this article applies to that person and the checking is harder because you did not engage them.
The workable position is to require that any substitute meet the same stated conditions and that you be told who they are. That is compatible with a genuine right of substitution; a blanket refusal of any substitute is not, and it costs a factor.
Vetting and background checks
A related requirement with its own shape. Where the work touches children, vulnerable people, money, security-sensitive sites or regulated data, checks on the individual are frequently mandatory and frequently attach to the buyer rather than to the supplier.
They are also one of the few things in this collection that a business should never soften out of concern about a factor. If a check is required for the work, it is required, and a supplier who objects to it is objecting to the conditions of the job rather than to an intrusion into their business.
Keeping the record
Four things per engagement: what was required, what was produced, when it was checked and by whom, and when it next needs checking.
That is a short row in a list rather than a system. The reason it is worth writing down is that the questions it answers tend to arrive after an incident, when nobody can remember who looked at what, and the absence of a record is treated as the absence of a check.