What certifications do concrete workers need?

It varies by GC, owner, and jurisdiction, but the recurring set: ACI certifications for finishers and field-testing technicians, OSHA 10 or 30 as the site-access baseline, silica awareness for anyone cutting or grinding, first aid/CPR for at least one person per crew, and equipment operator cards (forklift, aerial lift) where the crew runs them. The exact list matters less than the fact that nearly all of them expire.

How do you track certification expirations?

One row per certification — not per person — with type, issuer, cert number, issue date, and expiry date, and a rule that surfaces anything inside 60 days. That lead time is the whole game: an expiring cert is a renewal you schedule; an expired one is a worker you can’t put on the job this morning. The free tracker on this page does exactly that, with the math and color-coding built in.

How do you verify a contractor’s certification is actually active and not expired?

Go to the issuer, not the card. ACI runs a public certification-verification lookup — check the name and cert number against it. CPR and first-aid cards verify through the issuing organization. OSHA 10/30 cards have no central public registry, so verification runs through the authorized trainer who issued the card, or by requiring the card plus completion records. Make it repeatable: record the issuer and cert number in your tracker at hire, verify against the issuer then, and re-verify at each renewal — that’s a check you can hand to a coordinator.

Is a spreadsheet enough for certification tracking?

It’s a real upgrade from the binder, and the free tracker here is built to be that. Its honest limits: someone has to open it for the colors to matter, the documents still live somewhere else, and nothing warns the person making assignments. The moment that matters is when a lapsed worker gets put on a job that needs the cert — a warning there beats the cleanest spreadsheet.

Who should own cert tracking at a concrete sub?

One named person — usually whoever owns the roster: the office coordinator or the ops manager. Split ownership is how the binder failed in the first place. Give them the tracker, a 60-day rule, and the authority to pull someone off an assignment until the renewal is scheduled.

Contractor Certification Tracking (+ Free Tracker Template)

The certification that gets you in trouble is never the one you’re thinking about. It’s the one nobody’s watching — the card that quietly expired last month, on the one worker the GC asks about this morning. Cert tracking isn’t paperwork for its own sake; it’s making sure the moment someone asks “is he certified for that,” the answer is yes and you can prove it.

The certs a concrete crew actually carries

Depending on the work, the owner, and the jurisdiction, a concrete crew’s certifications can include:

ACI certifications — Concrete Flatwork Finisher/Technician and Field Testing Technician are the common ones on placement and QC.
OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 — the baseline safety cards many GCs require before you’re on site.
Silica awareness — training tied to the respirable crystalline silica standard for cutting, grinding, and mixing.
First aid / CPR — often required for at least one person per crew.
Equipment operator — forklift, skid steer, aerial lift; plus rigging and signal-person where crews handle picks.
Confined space, welding, flagger — job-specific, but they show up.

Which ones you need is set by the GC, the owner, and local rules — the point isn’t the exact list, it’s that every one of them expires, and every one of them can stop a worker at the gate.

Where the binder fails you

On most crews, certs live in three places at once: a binder in the office, a card in a glovebox, and somebody’s memory. That works right up until it doesn’t. Nobody knows what expires this month until a GC asks for the compliance matrix or an inspector asks to see the card — and then it’s a scramble through the binder, or worse, a stop-work while someone re-tests. The failure mode isn’t that you don’t have the certs. It’s that you can’t see them coming due.

Track the four things that matter

You don’t need a compliance department. You need four fields per cert, attached to the worker: type, issuer, issue date, and expiry date — plus a picture of the actual document, so the card isn’t only in the truck. Get that into one place tied to the roster and you’ve turned a binder into something you can actually query: who’s certified for what, and what lapses next.

Start with the free tracker

Here’s that structure as a working spreadsheet — one row per certification, type in the blue cells, and the Days-Left and Status columns compute themselves: red for expired, amber inside 60 days, green otherwise, with expired and expiring counters at the top for the Monday-morning glance. Works in Excel and Google Sheets, free, no email gate.

Download the Certification Tracker (.xlsx) →

Expiring-soon beats expired

The whole game is lead time. A cert that surfaces as expiring soon is a renewal you schedule on your terms; the same cert discovered expired is a worker you can’t put on the job this morning. Tracking expirations isn’t about the day they lapse — it’s about the weeks before, when fixing it is cheap and quiet.

The guardrail at the moment of assignment

The best time to catch a cert gap is the instant you’d create the risk: when you go to put a worker on a job that requires a cert he doesn’t have, or one that’s lapsed. A warning right there — at assignment — is worth more than the cleanest binder, because it stops the exposure before it’s on the schedule instead of documenting it after.

How Planning Ops handles it

Certification tracking lives inside the Manpower, next to the roster and crew board. Build a catalog of the cert types you care about, attach records to each worker — type, issuer, dates, and the document — and certs nearing expiry surface as expiring-soon so you renew before the lapse. Try to assign an uncertified or expired worker to a job that needs the cert and you get a warning before it’s on the board. Same place you schedule people, same place you confirm they’re cleared to be there — included in the plan at no extra cost.

Bring your roster in, attach the certs, and let the alerts watch the expiry dates for you. Planning Ops is built for concrete subs, veteran-owned, with a 14-day free trial and your whole crew free as viewers. Get Every Cert out of the Glovebox →

Certification tracking for concrete crews: staying inspection-ready