What Does NCCER Stand for? What Does It Do?

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What Does NCCER Stand for? What Does It Do

If you’ve ever looked for work operating heavy machinery, you have probably noticed multiple job postings listing “NCCER Certification Required.” Perhaps you’ve even missed out on work opportunities because you don’t have this all-important certification, and been left scratching your head because you aren’t even cer what it is.

What does NCCER stand for? What does it do? Why is having a certification from there so important for construction workers? Read on to find out.

The Importance of Construction Education

NCCER stands for the National Center for Construction Education and Research. It’s a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that training in the construction industry is standardized and held to a strict level of quality.

In the world of construction, companies want to ensure that anyone they hire will come equipped with a certain set of knowledge and skills, especially with regards to safety. Working with heavy machinery, of course, requires a great deal of knowledge about safe practices, both in the operation of the machines themselves and in general job site behavior.

By requiring NCCER certification, employers can ensure that anyone they hire to operate their heavy machinery will arrive on the job with an awareness of the latest requirements for construction safety, as well as a perfect understanding of how the equipment works.

What Does The NCCER Do, Exactly?

Being responsible for ensuring that construction education is standardized, the main job that the NCCER undertakes is accrediting training organizations, so that those organizations can offer certifications. Each instructor at any given training organization is also certified, and specifically trained to offer certifications to prospective construction workers.

The organization itself is made up of industry professionals, which means that every single person that sets the standards for construction education is highly experienced in the field and has themselves worked on many construction jobs.

Periodically, the NCCER will perform inspections in order to ensure that the organizations that are offering certifications are holding up NCCER standards. In this way, they can help to ensure that anyone who takes a job in the industry has been properly trained and will behave safely and intelligently on a job site. They will also bring the latest industry knowledge to bear when they take on an assignment.

How Do I Become NCCER Certified?

To become certified, you will need to seek out an accredited heavy equipment operator school, like West Coast Training. The best organizations not only offer classroom training on safety procedures and the physics of operating heavy machinery, they also offer plenty of on-the-job training so you can actually get behind the controls of the machinery you’ll be using.

West Coast Training offers training on not just one, but multiple types of equipment, from cranes, to dozers, to earthmovers. So not only will you walk away with the necessary certification that you need to secure employment, you can also earn experience with plenty of different equipment types, further expanding your future job prospects.