Highly qualified certification officers

Qualified and Competent Certification Team

Our team of highly qualified certification officers know identity and age checking systems and processes inside out. They are from a mix of trading standards, law enforcement and technical backgrounds to enable us to fully understand the basis of systems implemented and the analysis and assessment of outcomes.

There are plenty of technical challenges, methods, approaches and novel, innovative ideas for how to approach age check systems. Our underlying principle throughout is ‘does it work’. It might be a fabulous idea, but if it doesn’t work, it won’t get certified.

Our Systems Certification Auditors are required to possess the following skills:

• the ability to communicate with personnel of different job levels and types;
• a sense of fairness;
• an ability to focus on tasks;
• personal integrity, confidence, leadership; be open minded, ethical, diplomatic, observant, perceptive, decisive, culturally sensitive, and act with fortitude;
• a sense of order and planning ability;
• technical curiosity, skepticism, detail oriented; and

The skills described above shall be evaluated as part of entry-level requirements, as well as through training.

Our Test Purchasers are required to undertake competency assessment which is independently validated by Highfield Qualifications.

We also provide our team with:

• supervised training in technical audits;
• shadow auditing for our systems certification activities prior to allowing the auditor to undertake audits alone;
• a witnessed audit of the auditor to confirm competence is attained; and
• we document the sign-off of the satisfactory completion of the training program and witnessed audit.

We use a state-of-the-art Certification Management System to maintain the quality and consistency of our audit services. This includes:

• The details of the auditor’s qualifications, training, experience and scope of activity in relation to our audit categories are held and maintained within an auditor registration system.
• A record of auditor assessment is also be maintained in the employee’s training file.

We ensure a system is in place to maintain auditor qualification.

Our auditors are all members of their relevant professional body (such as the Chartered Trading Standards Institute) and are bound by the relevant professional code of conduct or ethics.

We also employ a dedicated Professional Standards Officer to oversee the continuous personal and professional development of our team, make sure that we maintain a highly ethical approach with integrity and maintain the confidence in the competence of our team.