IN Brief:
- NOCN is developing a desktop and mobile platform linked to its Skills Passport.
- The system will record skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours rather than qualifications alone.
- Employers will be able to use consolidated competence records to support Building Safety Act duties.
NOCN Group is preparing to launch a digital workforce competence platform intended to give construction employers a consolidated record of employee and contractor capability.
Linked to the NOCN Skills Passport and accessible through desktop and mobile devices, the system will bring qualifications, training, experience, professional development, and compliance information into a single secure environment.
Rather than functioning solely as a digital card or qualifications database, the platform will record skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours. Those four elements have become central to competence duties under the Building Safety Act and associated building regulations.
Employers will be able to view workforce capability across roles and projects, while individuals will hold a digital professional identity that develops as new qualifications, assessments, experience, and continuing professional development are added.
NOCN administers the Construction Plant Competence Scheme and other carding and assessment programmes. Its existing Skills Passport model provides verified digital records that can be shared between individuals, employers, and training organisations.
The planned platform will connect those records more closely with workforce planning and compliance, allowing construction companies to identify expiring credentials, training gaps, incomplete evidence, and employees who may be ready to progress into more responsible roles.
Possession of a certificate does not establish competence for every task or project environment. A qualification demonstrates assessed learning at a particular point, whereas competent performance may also depend on recent experience, supervision, project complexity, and familiarity with particular systems or risks.
NOCN has been working with employers, training providers, and industry organisations on the wider development of its digital skills environment. Participants have included construction, infrastructure, energy, college, and workforce development organisations.
While employers gain a broader organisational view, individuals will retain a continuing record that can move with them rather than remaining distributed across the systems of each employer or project.
Competence records move beyond card checking
Construction has traditionally relied on a mixture of cards, certificates, inductions, references, training records, and supervisory judgement. Those mechanisms remain necessary, but the information is often dispersed between human resources systems, project files, subcontractor portals, training providers, and individual workers.
Fragmentation makes it difficult to establish whether evidence is current, complete, and relevant to the work being assigned. A card may confirm that a qualification was achieved without showing whether the holder has recent experience of a specific installation, building type, item of equipment, or regulatory function.
The Building Safety Act has increased the consequence of that gap. Organisations and individuals carrying out design or building work must possess the skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours required for their functions, while those appointing them must take reasonable steps to establish competence.
Those obligations extend throughout the supply chain. Main contractors may hold detailed records for direct employees but rely on subcontractors to manage the competence of operatives, supervisors, designers, and specialists working under separate commercial arrangements.
A shared digital platform could improve visibility, although its reliability will depend on the evidence entered. Self declared experience, unverified records, and generic role descriptions cannot provide the same assurance as independently validated credentials and structured project histories.
Data governance will therefore be as important as the user interface. Employers need clarity over who can add, verify, amend, and remove records, while individuals require clear arrangements covering ownership, portability, privacy, and access after changing jobs.
Competence also changes over time. Regulations evolve, products are updated, systems become more complex, and skills can deteriorate when they are not used. A useful record must show dates, context, limitations, and renewal requirements rather than reducing capability to a permanent green status.
Workforce planning may prove more valuable than retrospective compliance. Companies could identify shortages before tendering, align training with future projects, and avoid assigning work to teams without the necessary depth of experience.
Gaps discovered after contract award can delay mobilisation, increase reliance on agency labour, restrict supervision capacity, and force packages to be resequenced. Earlier visibility allows those constraints to be addressed before they disrupt the programme.
Digital records will not replace competent management because supervisors must still observe performance, challenge unsafe behaviour, and judge whether a worker can apply knowledge under actual site conditions. The platform can support those decisions without making them automatically.
Interoperability will influence adoption. Contractors already use access control systems, learning platforms, card databases, project management tools, and human resources software, so repeated manual entry would add administration rather than reduce it.
NOCN’s proposed system addresses the need to convert dispersed evidence into a usable view of workforce capability. Its effectiveness will depend on whether records remain trusted, current, portable, and sufficiently detailed to support real appointment and deployment decisions.
