Two engagements, described as they happened. Neither client is named — one because our agreement runs through a third party, one because we have not asked. We would rather tell you why the names are missing than imply we were never trusted with them.
Project teams at a national engineering and construction firm brought CDRisk in to train their safety managers and excavation supervisors as trench and excavation competent persons — on their job sites, in Utah and Louisiana.
Sessions
Three
Single-day, on-site
Trained
~19
Safety managers & excavation supervisors
Locations
UT & LA
Separate project teams
The client is a national engineering and construction firm with a safety function of its own. On the surface, competent-person training is exactly the kind of thing a company that size handles internally — the knowledge is in the building.
We are not naming them. There is no restriction on our side; we simply have not asked for permission to use their name in marketing, and we would rather describe the work accurately than assume consent we were never given.
Risk transfer. A competent-person designation is not a certificate — it is an employer's formal determination that a specific person can identify hazards and has authority to correct them. When the company that makes that determination is also the company that delivered the training, the record has an obvious problem, and the question that follows it is worse:
How do you prove they are staying current?
An outside CSP breaks that loop. The determination rests on an independent evaluation by someone with no incentive to pass anyone, and a third party who can be called to testify about what these specific people demonstrated.
Single-day sessions delivered on their job sites, in small leadership cohorts — five in the first session, about fourteen across two more in Louisiana. Classroom instruction with hands-on soil work: putty, soil samples, and penetrometer probes, so soil classification is something the supervisors do with their hands rather than recognize on a slide.
That distinction is the point. A supervisor who has classified soil under observation is a defensible competent-person determination. A supervisor who watched a video about it is a line item.
They brought us back. Twice more, in a different state, for different project teams. Because the training is scoped per job site rather than run as a single enterprise contract, each engagement was a separate decision by a separate team — which is a harder thing to earn than a renewal.
What this says
If a firm with in-house safety capability still goes outside for competent-person training, the reason is not knowledge. It is that their own signature on their own training record is worth less than an independent one — and they know it before the investigator does.
A national third-party administrator sent us into a 100-plus employee underground utility installation subcontractor — an account approaching the point where insurance costs more than the work can carry.
The TPA and the insured are not named here. Our agreement is with the TPA; their insured never agreed to appear on our website, and being a high-EMR account is not something a company volunteers to publish.
What these accounts have in common
We do not set the criteria and we are not told how the determination gets made — assignments arrive already triaged, and how a TPA builds that list is its business, not ours to describe.
What we can say is what the accounts look like once we are standing on them. High experience modification rates. Incident histories and citation records that have drawn attention. And a trajectory toward one particular kind of failure: the premium stops being a line item and starts being a number the revenue cannot support. At that point the company is not choosing between safety vendors. It is choosing whether it can stay insured.
Their insurance application understated their exposure
Inconsistencies across their applications — including an error introduced by the insurance agency itself. The work being performed carried more risk than the paperwork described. Nothing found on a walkthrough catches this; it required reading the file against the operation.
Recordkeeping that would not have survived scrutiny
Documentation and retention gaps across the safety program. Records that exist but cannot be produced in the form and timeframe an investigator asks for are, functionally, records that do not exist.
Trench and excavation competent persons who lacked the required knowledge
The people formally designated to identify and correct excavation hazards did not have the knowledge the standard requires — at a company whose entire business is putting utilities in the ground.
The TPA kept the account and brought us on quarterly to manage it — working alongside the outside safety company the contractor already pays, rather than replacing them, to bring the program up to the standard it needs to meet.
That work started in February and is ongoing. We are not going to tell you the EMR has already moved, because a program this far out of position does not turn in two quarters, and any number we quoted this early would be a number we made up.
What this says
The paperwork that is supposed to protect a company — the application, the records, the competent-person designations — is often the thing that fails first, and it fails quietly. A trench contractor can operate for years with designated competent persons who cannot classify soil, because nothing tests that assumption until something collapses.
One company understood that a training record signed by the people who wrote it will not hold up, and paid to fix that before anyone tested it. The other found out that its competent persons could not do the job only because an outsider was sent to look.
The difference between them was not knowledge or budget. It was whether anyone independent had checked.
Trench and excavation competent-person training, or a loss-control survey of your own operation. Rates are published — no discovery call required to learn what it costs.