INDUSTRY NEWS
Education before registration As the past chairman of LEEASA, a recognised VA and an ex-councillor at ECSA, I need to bring to the attention of the department that there are serious problems regarding the competency of the LMI’s being registered at ECSA. This is being debated on the various WhatsApp groups with no solution to resolve the predicament. The solution exists and has been ignored. Who am I to make a judgment of this nature? Because of my background of 20 plus years in the hydraulic industry, I had been exposed to many lifting problems. Having been in the lifting industry for over 30 years, I have fixed, redesigned and modified equipment to function properly. A list of categories for which LMI's should be registered for has been submitted and include tackle, chain blocks, forklifts, mobile cranes, overhead cranes, tower cranes, ship cranes, wharf side cranes, reach stackers, straddle carriers, container cranes, aerial platforms, suspended access platforms, industrial lifting devices, under the hook non fixed devices, tail lifters and vehicle hoists. It now remains the responsibility of the new assessors contributing at ECSA to revise this. The dominating areas that influence the lifting industry are mechanical, structural, electrical/ 8
Lifting Africa - May/Jun 2020
electronic and hydraulics. I recently did a presentation at the DoEL on hydraulics and they were amazed to find out that hydraulics influences all of these except for tackle. 1. The OHS Act states very clearly that an LMI and or an LTI should be competent. The definition of the competent person is quite clear as indicated in the definitions of the DMR regulations. 2. ECSA has always had an issue with specified categories when it comes to education because ECSA recognises NQF5 as the benchmark. The tertiary education sector is very well represented at ECSA including representation of our universities. However, it has always been thrown in our faces that our sector does not have a qualification which is incorrect. 3. When we started our specified category for LMI’s, we wrote a level 5 qualification which was registered with SAQA at the time. This was motivated by the DoL who engaged with the merSeta. 4. Registered level 5 qualifications used by the tertiary educators are compiled on the outcome-based system only and do not have
assessment criteria to underpin the outcomes. As a result of this, our group was tasked to redo the qualification and include assessment criteria. This we did and one year later we had done 9 unit standards to cover our range of equipment. 5. When we were finished we submitted these unit standards to SAQA for registration only to learn that the QCTO had been established and that these unit standards had to be registered by the QCTO which opening it’s doors in 3 months. This never happened in 3 months but only started 3 to 4 years later. 6. At this point, ECSA then re-did our qualification based on simply elaborating on what we had already done.This group of documents has included some other disciplines,
