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:

	Credential	Qualification
What it is	A licence, check or government ID the person holds	Training the person completed
Who vouches for it	A register — "is this card valid for this person?"	An issuing organisation (RTO, university, training provider)
How Oho checks it	Asks the register about the person	Asks the register about the qualification — see below
Lifecycle	Renewed, re-verified, can be suspended or revoked	Attained once; only the subset with a currency requirement expires
Examples	Working With Children Check, AHPRA registration, police check	CHC33021 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.

Field	Answers	Who says so	Values
Status	Did they complete the training?	The issuer	ATTAINED, IN_PROGRESS, EXPIRED, SUPERSEDED, WITHDRAWN
Verification status	How good is the evidence?	The document	NOT_VERIFIED, SELF_DECLARED, DOCUMENT_VERIFIED, ISSUER_VERIFIED
Register check	Does the thing they hold still stand?	The national register	VALID, REVIEW_REQUIRED, NOT_ON_REGISTER
Reviewer decision	Does it still satisfy our requirement?	Your organisation	ACCEPTED, 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 — see Adding a qualification below.
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.

Training imported from your HR system arrives as credentials

Training records that IntelliHR, Humanforce, iChris, HiBob or Workday send land on the worker as credentials, not qualifications. They show on the Credentials tab and can satisfy a credential requirement, but they are not checked against the national register, get no ACECQA tier, and don't satisfy a qualification requirement such as a course code or "Diploma or above". To have one count as a qualification, add it from the Qualifications tab or ask the worker for their USI transcript.

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.

Adding a qualification

Add qualification opens with the Qualification field set to search the national register. Type a national training code or part of a title — CHC33021, or first aid — and pick the match. Picking from the register is what stores the national training code on the record, and the code is what later register checks are run against. The picker shows each result's status, so a superseded code is visible as you choose it.

Under the field is a Not on the national register? link. Clicking it swaps the search box for a plain text box, for the qualifications training.gov.au doesn't carry: a degree, overseas study, an in-house course. What you type there becomes Oho's own qualification type — the code requirements are written against — not a national training code.

Issued by works the same way: search the registered training organisations, or switch to free text for an issuer that isn't an RTO.

"Recorded without a national training code"

A qualification saved through the free-text route carries this note on the worker's profile, and its register check reads NOT_ON_REGISTER.

It isn't a problem to fix. It's a statement of fact: with no national code there is nothing on the register to check the qualification against, so Oho says so rather than claiming a verdict it didn't get. The qualification still counts towards compliance, still satisfies requirements written against its type, and never lands in a review queue for this reason alone.

Linking an existing qualification to the register

If a qualification was saved without a national code and you want one on it, editing it won't get you there. Edit qualification opens the Qualification field in free-text mode for these records, and there's no way back to the register search from inside the form. Typing a code into that box sets Oho's qualification type to the code's text — it does not link the record to the register.

What works instead:

1. Add qualification again on the same worker, this time picking the qualification from the register search.
2. Copy across the dates, certificate number and notes from the old record.
3. Delete the old record with Delete qualification.

Do it in that order. The new record is the one carrying the national code, so the register check and any ACECQA verdict follow it, not the one you're removing.

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.

Evidencing a qualification

An attainment with nothing behind it is SELF_DECLARED — somebody said so, nobody has seen the paper. Two things move it up.

A document, sighted. Attach a testamur, statement of attainment or academic transcript, and Oho asks a person to look at it in Review & Decide. Accepting records the qualification as DOCUMENT_VERIFIED.

A USI transcript. When a person shares their authenticated USI VET transcript, Oho reads it and marks every row it finds with a pass outcome as ISSUER_VERIFIED — the training regulator's own record of the attainment, which outranks a sighted document.

What Oho reads off the document

On plans that include document recognition, an attached document is read when it lands: the national training code, the course title, the issuing organisation and its RTO number, the completion date, the certificate number and the name printed on it. Oho asks its copy of the national register whether the code and provider are real, and shows you what the document says beside what the record says wherever the two disagree — a code read one character out, a different provider, a date that is neither the completion nor the issue date on file.

Nothing read off the document is written onto the qualification. The review item names the disagreement; a person decides which side is right.

Every document is still sighted by a person

A clean read never closes the question, because no reading of the paper can answer it: with no per-person attainment lookup to call, nothing establishes that this person earned the qualification. A credential attachment that verifies cleanly raises no review; a qualification document always does. What the reading changes is how urgent the item looks and what it tells the reviewer — never whether there is one.

Does it count for childcare? (ACECQA)

training.gov.au says a code exists, who issued it and whether it has been superseded. It never says whether that code counts as an Early Childhood Teacher, Diploma-level or Certificate III-level qualification in an education and care service. That is ACECQA's call, published as its own list under regulation 137 of the Education and Care Services National Regulations — and for a childcare service it is the whole question.

Oho records it as a second verdict, kept apart from the register check, because the two disagree routinely: a code the register calls superseded is very often still an approved Diploma-level qualification, and a code the register calls current may never have been approved for childcare at all.

Field	Answers	Values
ACECQA Tier	What does it count as?	ECT, DIPLOMA, CERTIFICATE_III, or nothing yet
ACECQA Approval	Is it on the approved list?	APPROVED, CONDITIONS_APPLY, NOT_APPROVED, NOT_ASSESSED
ACECQA State Limits	Is the approval limited to one state?	A state code such as QLD; empty means national

All three can be filtered on in search.

The four outcomes are not a pass/fail scale. CONDITIONS_APPLY is the honest answer for the large part of ACECQA's list Oho cannot settle on its own — approvals limited to one state, and approvals whose date rule depends on when the holder enrolled, which Oho does not record. Those are a qualified yes for a person to confirm, not a refusal. NOT_ASSESSED means the check declined to judge, which is not the same as unapproved: a hand-entered qualification with no national code is the common case.

An empty tier means no tier has been established — never read it as "does not count for childcare".

Designated roles

ACECQA's list also approves qualifications for the roles a service has to be able to name a person for — first aid, emergency asthma management, anaphylaxis management, family day care coordinator and suitably qualified person. These are not staffing tiers, and a qualification carries one or the other, never both: a first aid certificate approves its holder for a role, it does not make them Diploma-level.

Field	Answers	Values
ACECQA Capabilities	Which designated roles does it approve?	Any of the five above — a course can approve more than one
ACECQA Capability Approval	Is it approved for those roles?	APPROVED, CONDITIONS_APPLY, NOT_APPROVED, NOT_ASSESSED

A course approved for both first aid and emergency asthma management approves its holder for both — roles are not a ladder, so Oho records every one the qualification reaches rather than picking a winner.

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:

Situation	Effect on the worker
A reviewer decided REJECTED	A blocking problem — may not engage
The issuer marked it WITHDRAWN	A blocking problem
A currency period has lapsed	Counts as expired
Register says REVIEW_REQUIRED, nobody has decided	Goes to Review & Decide
Still IN_PROGRESS	Unresolved — holds the worker At Risk, like a pending credential. Being enrolled is not yet an attainment
SUPERSEDED	Counts 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.

Related

• Credentials → — the clearances, registrations and IDs a worker holds.
• Compliance rules → — how a role's requirements are expressed and evaluated.
• Review & Decide → — the queue register findings and document reviews land in.
• Document recognition (OCR) → — what Oho reads off an uploaded testamur.
• Workers & Credentials API → — creating and verifying qualifications over REST.