Sling inspector training, rigging awareness and signal awareness, taught at your site by someone who builds the equipment for a living. Thirty minutes on the shop floor or an hour in front of a hundred and fifty. No charge to our customers.
There is no such thing as an OSHA-certified rigger. That surprises people, and it changes what you should be asking for.
OSHA does not run a rigger certification program and does not accredit anyone else's. What the regulations do is put the decision on you, the employer, and then expect you to be able to defend it.
Which rules apply to you depends on where you work. Plants and warehouses fall under 29 CFR Part 1910 (general industry). Construction sites fall under Part 1926. The requirements below are labeled accordingly, because applying the wrong one is its own problem.
OSHA 1910.184(d) requires slings to be inspected each day before use "by a competent person designated by the employer." The standard defines designated as "selected or assigned by the employer or the employer's representative as being qualified to perform specific duties." It does not define competent person, and it sets no training syllabus, no exam and no certification card. You decide who is qualified.
It does require one piece of paper: under 1910.184(e)(3)(ii) you must keep a record of the most recent month in which each alloy steel chain sling was thoroughly inspected, and produce it on request.
On construction work the equivalent rule is 1926.251(a)(1): rigging equipment for material handling is inspected prior to use on each shift and as necessary during use. The qualified rigger requirements below come from the construction crane standard and do not reach a general-industry plant at all.
The construction crane standard requires a qualified rigger for specific work: rigging during assembly and disassembly (1926.1404(r)(1)), and rigging where employees are in the fall zone hooking, unhooking or guiding a load (1926.1425(c)(3)). A qualified person is defined at 1926.1401 as one who, by possession of a recognized degree, certificate or professional standing, or by extensive knowledge, training and experience, has successfully demonstrated the ability to solve or resolve problems relating to the subject matter, the work or the project.
There is still no mandated certificate. OSHA states that employers determine rigger qualification against the hoisting job to be performed, and that an employer may use a third party to assess a rigger candidate but is not required to.
So the question an auditor asks is not "is he certified?" It is "on what basis did you designate this person?" Documented training is the most common answer, and it is the one we help you build.
Most of what we teach is inspection, because that is where the paperwork lives, and it is a common source of citations.
Removal criteria by sling type, what a defensible inspection looks like, how to write a record that reads clearly to someone who was not there, and tagging. Aimed at the people you have designated to inspect.
Sling selection, hitches, angle factors, rated loads, shock loading, edge protection, and what to pull out of service on the spot. The basics, taught against the equipment your crew actually handles.
Hand signals and the Standard Method, and what the signal person's job actually is. This is background knowledge, not the qualification described above.
We ask what you run before we come out. A plant lifting with chain slings and a shipyard running wire rope bridles need different hours spent on different things, and a session that covers everything equally covers nothing well. If your inventory is mostly synthetic round slings, that is where the time goes.
The sling guide sets out the removal criteria we teach against, and the calculators run the angle and capacity math we work through in the room. Both are free, and useful to hand people afterwards.
A thirty-minute toolbox talk before a shift. Forty-five minutes with fifteen or twenty people in a break room. An hour in an auditorium in front of a hundred and fifty. We have done all three and the format is up to you. Tell us the window you can clear and the number of people, and we will build the session to fit it rather than turning up with a fixed deck.
We come to you. That matters more than it sounds: teaching removal criteria in a room next to your own rigging means we can walk out and put hands on the actual slings, and the examples stop being abstract. Classroom-only works, but on the floor works better.
Nothing, for our customers. Training is a service we provide to the people who buy from us. There is no per-head charge and no minimum group size.
Depends on where the calendar sits when you call. Rather than publish a lead time that is wrong half the year: call, tell us the date you have in mind and how many people, and we will give you a real answer on the phone.
We will issue a certificate of attendance for everyone in the room, naming the course and the date, if you want one. Here is exactly what it is and is not.
It is not a credential. It does not certify anyone, it carries no accreditation, and nobody should walk out believing they are now a certified rigger. We would rather say that plainly than let a piece of paper do work it cannot do.
It is a training record, and that is the useful part. Under 1910.184 you designate your inspectors, and you are expected to have a basis for it. A dated record showing who attended what training, from a company that fabricates and inspects lifting equipment, is the kind of evidence employers generally rely on to support that designation. That is how our customers typically file it.
Sessions are taught by Steve Nelson, third-generation co-owner of Nelson Wire Rope, with over twelve years manufacturing lifting and rigging equipment. He has completed the rigging training programs run by The Crosby Group and Peerless Industrial Group, two of the manufacturers whose hardware sits in most of the plants we visit.
This is not a training company that learned about slings in order to teach them. The person in the room has built the assemblies he is describing, proof tested them, and inspected them after they came back from the field. When the session covers why a kinked wire rope sling is finished, or what a sling looks like after someone shock loaded it, those are failures he has had in his hands.
Training tends to surface problems. A crew that has just learned the removal criteria usually walks out and finds rigging that meets them. Because we also inspect, repair and fabricate, the equipment that gets condemned in the week after a session has somewhere to go without a second vendor.
Tell us how many people, how long you can give us, and what you lift with.
Regulatory references: OSHA 29 CFR 1910.184 (slings, general industry, including the definition of designated), 29 CFR 1926.251 (rigging equipment, construction), 29 CFR 1926.1401 (definition of qualified person), 29 CFR 1926.1404(r) and 1926.1425(c) (qualified rigger), and 29 CFR 1926.1428 (signal person qualifications). ASME B30.9 Slings is an industry consensus standard, not a regulation, and is not incorporated into the OSHA rules above; we inspect and teach to it because it is the recognized practice. Training delivered on site nationwide from Hatfield, Pennsylvania. Details current as of 2026.