Schemes, examinations, certificates
Welder and procedure certification
A certification body's audit is not about the certificates. It is about how thousands of decisions were made, on what evidence, under which scheme revision.
How it works
- 01
Take the application
Scheme, ranges applied for, the candidate's identity and prior qualifications, and what the applicant is paying for.
- 02
Run the examination
Test pieces witnessed by a qualified invigilator, with the invigilator's own qualification checked at the time.
- 03
Evaluate and decide
Destructive and non-destructive results, evaluated against the scheme. The decision-maker is not the examiner.
- 04
Issue and maintain
The certificate, its designation string, its validity window, its continuity evidence and its revalidation route.
What it covers
Scheme versioning
A certificate is bound to the scheme revision it was issued under, permanently.
Separation of duties
Examiner, evaluator and decision-maker are enforced as different people.
Designation strings
Built from the qualified variables rather than typed.
Validity and continuity
Confirmation windows, six-month evidence, revalidation and recertification routes.
Public verification
A QR that anybody can check, without telephoning your office.
Immutable issue
An issued certificate is superseded, never edited.
Verification is the part everyone gets wrong
In most of this market, confirming that a welder’s certificate is genuine and still valid means telephoning the body that issued it during office hours. Some publish a PDF. A few publish nothing at all and ask you to email.
That is a strange state of affairs for a document whose entire purpose is to be trusted by a third party who has never met you. A certificate that cannot be verified independently is asking for trust it has not earned.
A QR that resolves to a public page — issuer, scheme, ranges, validity, current status — costs almost nothing to provide and removes an entire category of doubt. It also removes an entire category of fraud, which matters more to the bodies that do this properly than to anyone else.