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Qualifications

A qualification is training or education a worker has completed — a VET certificate, a degree, a short course, a first aid ticket. It sits on a worker's profile in its own Qualifications tab, next to their credentials.

A qualification is a peer of a credential, not a kind of credential. The two look alike on screen and answer different questions:

CredentialQualification
What it isA licence, check or government ID the person holdsTraining the person completed
Who vouches for itA register — "is this card valid for this person?"An issuing organisation (RTO, university, training provider)
How Oho checks itAsks the register about the personAsks the register about the qualification — see below
LifecycleRenewed, re-verified, can be suspended or revokedAttained once; only the subset with a currency requirement expires
ExamplesWorking With Children Check, AHPRA registration, police checkCHC33021 Certificate III in Individual Support, HLTAID011 Provide First Aid, a nursing degree

What a qualification records​

  • What it is — a display name, Oho's qualification type code (what requirements are written against), the national training code where one exists (CHC33021), the register's own product type (Qualification, Skill set, Unit of competency…), AQF level, and field of study.
  • Who holds it — the name printed on the testamur, which is often a maiden or preferred name rather than the one on the worker record, plus their Unique Student Identifier (USI) where supplied.
  • Who issued it — the RTO, university or training provider, its RTO code, and the country of issue.
  • When — completion date, issue date, and an expiry date only where the training carries a currency requirement.
Units and qualifications both live here

A transcript lists dozens of units of competency against a handful of qualifications. Both are VET training, so Oho records the register's product type on each row and groups them separately — otherwise the four things a reviewer is looking for are buried under forty things they are not. Units matter in their own right: HLTAID011 Provide First Aid is a unit, and it is one of the most-chased expiring requirements in care work.

Four separate questions​

The fields that look like "status" are four different statements by four different parties. Reading one as another is the usual source of confusion.

FieldAnswersWho says soValues
StatusDid they complete the training?The issuerATTAINED, IN_PROGRESS, EXPIRED, SUPERSEDED, WITHDRAWN
Verification statusHow good is the evidence?The documentNOT_VERIFIED, SELF_DECLARED, DOCUMENT_VERIFIED, ISSUER_VERIFIED
Register checkDoes the thing they hold still stand?The national registerVALID, REVIEW_REQUIRED, NOT_ON_REGISTER
Reviewer decisionDoes it still satisfy our requirement?Your organisationACCEPTED, REJECTED, or no decision yet

A document-verified certificate from an RTO whose registration was cancelled is strong evidence of something that may no longer count — which is why the four are kept apart.

No reviewer decision is the normal state, and it is not the same as ACCEPTED. A qualification with no decision counts on its attainment alone; only an explicit REJECTED stops it satisfying a requirement.

How qualifications get onto a record​

  1. You add one from the Qualifications tab on a worker or applicant.
  2. The person lists them. A USI Transcript check can be included in a screening package or a fetch request. It asks the person to list the nationally recognised training on their USI transcript, and saves every line as its own qualification. Rows they picked from the register arrive with the register's own code, title, product type and AQF level rather than their recollection of it; anything the register doesn't carry — a degree, overseas study, an in-house course — is submitted just as faithfully, as typed. These rows land as SELF_DECLARED: somebody typed the list out, nobody has seen the paper yet.
  3. Through the API — see Workers & Credentials, §13.
The transcript asks for a year, not a date

People remember the year they finished, and the transcript itself prints only a year. Asking for a day would invent precision nobody supplied.

What the register check can and can't answer​

training.gov.au publishes no per-person attainment lookup. There is no register to ask "does this worker hold this?" the way there is for a Working With Children Check.

What the register can answer is whether the qualification still stands, and that is what moves a worker's compliance position:

  • The issuing RTO's registration was cancelled. ASQA then commences cancelling the qualifications that RTO issued, so the certificate may cease to be recognised at all.
  • The code was superseded. The attainment is real and stays on the record, but the current equivalent may require additional training before it satisfies a requirement.

Both are checked against Oho's copy of the register rather than a live call, so a check is cheap enough to run on every qualification. Oho re-checks every qualification after each register refresh and only writes back the ones whose verdict actually changed — so a worker isn't left with a qualification that quietly stopped being recognised until somebody happened to open their profile.

A NOT_ON_REGISTER result is never treated as a problem. Degrees, overseas study and older statements of attainment are legitimately absent from training.gov.au, and flagging them would fill the queue with rows nobody can act on.

How qualifications affect compliance​

Qualifications count toward a worker's compliance position alongside their credentials, and surface in the same profile banners. In order of precedence:

SituationEffect on the worker
A reviewer decided REJECTEDA blocking problem — may not engage
The issuer marked it WITHDRAWNA blocking problem
A currency period has lapsedCounts as expired
Register says REVIEW_REQUIRED, nobody has decidedGoes to Review & Decide
Still IN_PROGRESSUnresolved — holds the worker At Risk, like a pending credential. Being enrolled is not yet an attainment
SUPERSEDEDCounts nowhere — not a problem, not unresolved

A register finding raises a review, not an automatic downgrade. Whether a superseded code or a cancelled RTO means this worker is still qualified for this role is a policy call, and only a person can make it. Accepting the review clears it — answering the question is what accepting it was.

Superseded codes are the norm rather than the exception: training packages are reissued every few years, so an established workforce will name superseded codes in bulk. To keep the queue readable, a superseded product is raised at low priority, a review never stacks on the same qualification twice, and qualifications already recorded as expired, superseded or withdrawn are skipped.

Pausing a qualification

Like a credential, a qualification can be taken out of automated re-checking. Pausing does not clear the last verdict — the stored outcome stays as an audit trail, shown as a frozen snapshot rather than a live claim.