Hi All,
I am more than a little confused over which of the qualifications (CPCS A36 or ALLMI) is the best to go for.
The company that I work for are looking to invest in a Hiab for lifing steel in to place so will be looking to get the ‘Hook’ ticket.
I have previously held RTITB (NORRS), but this has lapsed now.
Hi NicKan,
We do lots of HIAB training, let me enlighten you into the murky world of crane training…
Everyone used to have two choices either pay through the nose for CITB (CPCS) licences, who made is overly complex and expensive by making it an NVQ, which means they get a kick back from the government, so they got paid twice.
Or
Get a licence with a company such as RTITB, AiTT, ITSAAR, NPOR who are much better priced but the instructors are based on mostly forklifts and frankly haven’t got a clue what they are doing with a HIAB! I know this from experience as we used to provide RTITB licences for cranes.
Then everyone saw the light, which was in fact the HSE telling the industry to get its act together and create a solid framework for installing, maintaining and providing quality training on Lorry Mounted Cranes. ALLMI who at that point was a manufacturing association for lorry mounted cranes were tasked with producing a operator training scheme that actually taught individuals the correct techniques and maintain high standards of assessments. The industry since then has happily gravitated to ALLMI as they seem reluctant to trust forklift instructors with training employees to use cranes that cost £100,000’s that could drop a load on someone’s head if they pull the wrong lever!
Also, make sure you train on a crane with remote control, like ours, a licence on an old manual control crane might be useless to most employers with remote cranes.
Here is our remote crane that can take, hook, brick clamp, clamshell bucket with remote control - picture shows it outside the company that fitted it, sorry it looks so dirty, but it works well.
Only just seen this while searching HIAB, not sure how I missed it. Answered my question about A36. But what happens if you turn up at a building site. Can they turn you away if you don’t have CPCS?
I know what you mean about this scam they’ve got going. If the employer won’t give a job to the poor sod who has spent their savings on getting a red card it says a lot about how little faith employers have in the training/testing regime.
Cost of the two tests is outrageous.
if you are concerned about the validity of the ALLMI card then visit ALLMI | Lorry Loader / Hiab Operator Training. CSCS approved. HSE Recognised.
we charge £360/£540 depending if you choose the one day existing operator or 2 day novice operator course. I paid £26,000 for the crane to be fitted, this means i need to train over 57 novice operators to pay for just the truck, thats before taking account of the wages, fuel, repairs and admin costs. I don’t expect to earn any actual profit from our training truck until its done over 100 courses and as we complete less than 30 per year that will take 3 to 4 years!
i’m hoping it will be a good investment for the future that will eventually pay off as the crane should last 10 years, and it enables us to provide high quality training with good equipment - not some tired hiab dragged out of the nettles that doesn’t lend well to a high standard of instruction.
Just wondering what opportunities there are for the other ALLMI categories?
Other than the 3 main ones: hook, clam, grab it mentions hoist, pallet, auger and special (whatever that means).
Does it make sense to try and get them all?
Searching old posts also answered another question I had. If you did manual only doesn’t cover you for remote but doing remote also allows you to operate manual even though manual is supposed to be harder.
The only other question I’ve not resolved seems to be scant information on it concerns going over 20tm. Are they still recognisable as hiabs or are they those huge cranes you occasionally see when the crane takes up the whole trailer and therefore no room for a load? I would imagine such work (and training) is few and far between and one driver on their own probably not allowed.