Verification of competency (VOC): what it is and what auditors expect

A verification of competency answers one question: can this person safely do this task, on this equipment, on this site, right now?

It is not a qualification. It does not come from a training package. It is not issued by a regulator, it has no national expiry, and there is no such thing as a VOC card that works everywhere. That absence of standardisation is why the term causes so much confusion — and why the evidence behind it is so often thin when somebody finally looks at it.

VOC versus ticket: the distinction that matters

A high risk work licence, a statement of attainment or a ticket records that a person was assessed against a national unit of competency at a point in time. That is genuinely valuable. It is also a claim about the past, made by someone who has never seen your site.

A person can hold a valid forklift licence and have not operated one in four years. A person can hold an excavator statement of attainment obtained on a 5-tonne machine and be assigned to a 45-tonne one. A person can be fully ticketed and have never worked in the specific conditions your site presents — the grade, the traffic interaction, the ground conditions, the isolation procedure.

The ticket does not answer any of that. The VOC does.

This is why sites require both, and why "they have their tickets" is not a response to a request for VOC evidence. The two are complementary rather than alternative:

What a VOC actually involves

A defensible VOC has four components. Sites that get audited badly are almost always missing one of them.

1. A defined standard. What "competent" means for this task, written down before the assessment. Usually drawn from the relevant unit of competency, the manufacturer's operating requirements, the site's own procedure and the risk assessment for the task. Without a defined standard, the assessment is one person's opinion of another person's work.

2. Underpinning knowledge. Verbal or written questioning covering the things you cannot see from watching: hazards and their controls, pre-start and fault reporting, isolation and lockout, load charts or exclusion zones, emergency response, and the site's specific rules.

3. Practical demonstration. The task, performed, observed. This is the part that makes it a verification rather than a quiz. It should cover the routine operation and at least the foreseeable abnormal conditions — what they do when something is wrong, not only what they do when everything is fine.

4. A record. Who, what, when, by whom, against what standard, with the outcome and any conditions or limitations. This is the part that gets produced in an audit and the part most often found wanting.

Who can conduct one

The assessor must be competent in the task and competent to assess.

There is no requirement that a VOC be conducted by a registered training organisation, unless the intended outcome is a nationally recognised statement of attainment — in which case only an RTO with that unit on its scope can issue it. For an internal VOC, an experienced supervisor or trainer with an assessment qualification is the norm.

What matters when the evidence is examined is that the assessor's own competence is documented. This is the single most common gap. A folder full of VOC forms signed by a leading hand, with nothing on file showing what qualified that leading hand to assess anybody, is worth much less than it looks. An auditor's next question after "who assessed them?" is always "and who says they could?"

How often, and what should trigger a re-verification

There is no national VOC currency period. Sites set their own, and the common range for plant operation is 12 to 24 months.

A period alone is a weak control, because it is blind to what the person actually did in that period. Better practice pairs a maximum interval with trigger events:

• a significant incident or near miss involving the task;
• a change to the plant, the procedure or the site conditions;
• an extended period without performing the task — typically three to six months;
• return to work after injury or illness affecting capacity;
• a supervisor's observation raising a concern;
• moving to a new site with materially different conditions.

The extended-absence trigger is the one that catches most real degradation, and it is the one that almost never exists in a purely date-based system. A worker who was verified eleven months ago and has not touched the machine since is, on paper, current.

Where the legal obligation comes from

VOC is not a term that appears in the WHS Act. The obligation it discharges does.

Under the model WHS framework, a PCBU must ensure workers are provided with the information, training, instruction or supervision necessary to protect them from risk. There are specific duties around plant: ensuring plant is used only by people who have been provided the necessary information and training, and ensuring high risk work is done only by people appropriately licensed.

In Queensland resources, the framework is more directive. Under the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999 and the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Act 1999, the site senior executive has a personal obligation to ensure that people at the mine are competent to do the work they are asked to do — and the SSE's obligation covers everyone at the mine, contracting companies included.

That is the mechanism by which a mine's requirements land on a contracting company. The SSE cannot discharge a personal obligation about your team's competency by accepting your word for it. They need evidence, which means you need evidence.

The obligation has sharpened again since 1 June 2026, when Queensland's critical control management requirements took full effect under the Resources Safety and Health Legislation Amendment Act 2024. A critical control is only genuinely in place if the person performing it is competent to perform it — so verifying competency is now part of verifying the control, rather than a separate administrative exercise.

What auditors and clients actually ask for

When a client requests VOC evidence, they are looking for five specific things. If you can produce all five for a named worker in under a minute, you are in good shape.

1. Who — the worker, identified unambiguously.
2. What — the task or plant, specifically. "Excavator" is weak; "excavator, 30–50t class, trenching adjacent to services" is evidence.
3. Who assessed, and on what authority — the assessor and their own credentials.
4. When — the date, and the currency period or next-due date.
5. The record itself — what was observed and against what standard, not just a signature on a cover sheet.

Requests for this arrive at inconvenient times, usually because something has happened somewhere else. The businesses that handle it well are not the ones with better VOCs. They are the ones whose VOCs are held as dated records against the person and the machine, rather than as scanned forms in a folder structure named after whoever filed them.

The failure modes worth knowing

The photocopied VOC. One assessment, copied across a crew, all dated the same day, all signed identically. It does not survive scrutiny and it damages the credibility of every other record you hold.

The desk VOC. A written test, no practical component. Verifies knowledge, not competence.

The assessor with no assessor evidence. Covered above. Fix this first — it is the cheapest gap to close and the one most likely to be found.

The VOC with no scope. "Verified competent — plant operation." Competent at what, on what, under what conditions? A VOC with no scope proves nothing when the question is about a specific machine on a specific day.

The perfectly maintained folder nobody can search. The records exist and are good, and producing them takes two days, because the only index is a person. This is the most common state of affairs in businesses that take compliance seriously, and it is why the request always seems to arrive during their annual leave.