The company I work for carry's out driver training refresh courses for its staff that are required to operate forklifts including us technicians.

The technicians have maintenance & inspection purposes driver training certification held at head office & we also get a pdf copy to show any customers that ask for proof.

There are companies out there who can do loading shovels, excavators etc, try a search around the Yorkshire area on google, i'm sure there are a couple of centres up there who specialise in large plant and actually have it available at their training centres.

We have been trained on the usual small CB, reach and pedestrin pallet/stacker truck. We ideally need everything else, from loading shovel through telehandler to reach stacker.

thanks.

Unfortunately, as you will have discovered, most training centres only have Reach, Counterbalance, Pallet Truck, and occasionally a Telehandler available.

Which machines are you looking to train on?

Hi. We have been struggling to find such courses for a wide range of trucks and vehicles that canbe run on instructors premises. We do not have our own premises or trucks (in a manner of speaking).

Can anyone assist?

TIA

This is exactly what my employer did with me and the other engineers.
We essentially had a 1 day course, we skipped the theory as the instructor simply said 'you know more about forklifts then we do' (fair play to him).
He tested us on counterbalance, reach, telehandler, order picker and a 12tonne capacity counterbalance. Basically just drive round the building/workshop/yard without hitting anything.
It's stated 'for maintenance and testing purposes only'.
But I agree, your service engineer should have some record of operating training, albeit not a full operators license.

Many thanks for your help with this!

It's the old 'adequate training' bit of the HASAWA that you need to be aware of, so yes there should be some form of training record for engineers operating the trucks, not necessarily a full operators course but certainly some form of training.

I have run these shortened courses in the past for engineers, and endorsed the certificate with something along the lines of "for the purposes of maintenance, testing and inspection"

If one of th engineers is involved in any type of incident you may need to satisfy the HSE that you have complied with S2 of HASAWA as above, and also your insurers will be asking the same question.

Hope this helps.

(FLT instructor since 1996)

hello Marc
when you say FLT engineer and FLT license are you referring to what we call over here in the states as a technician factory certification?
And as far as driving any lifts we require a lift truck operator license or card showing we've been trained to operate a particular type of lift or machine.

IMO from a technical standpoint, just because a technician has a certification to repair a lift it doesn't necessarily mean he can drive one. Factory training classes do not teach how to drive a lift, they teach how to repair so in reality a factory certification does not define a technician's ability to operate a lift although he knowingly needs to know how it operates. In my years of training classes we have been required to get on the machine and operate the controls and drive it for diagnostic reasons but that does not get us the 'operator license card', we have to take a separate dedicated 'operator class' for that which is more detailed oriented towards actually driving and operating the lift from an operators standpoint.

We are required to have operator training and also have an operator license card from our company (not the manufacturer).