We do not sell training. That is worth saying at the top of a page about accreditation, because almost every page you will find on this subject is published by a provider describing its own credentials, and the incentive there runs one way.
What follows is the verification we run before recommending anyone, and you can run all of it yourself in an afternoon.
The reason to bother is that the word accredited is doing far less work than employers assume. It sounds like a property of a company, the way a licence or a tax clearance is. It is not. It is a property of one programme, delivered at one address, for a defined period, assessed a defined way. Change any of those and the accreditation does not travel with it.
Why is the phrase SETA accredited no longer enough?
Because the body that accredits has changed, and the phrase has not.
For programmes falling under the Occupational Qualifications Sub-Framework, the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations accredits skills development providers, assessment centres and occupational skills programmes. SAQA registers qualifications on the National Qualifications Framework and keeps the national record of them, but SAQA describes itself as the custodian of the framework rather than a provider accreditation body. SETAs continue to run sector skills planning, learnerships, workplace skills submissions and grant administration.
Some SETAs also hold quality assurance roles of their own. CETA, for the construction sector, is accredited as an Education and Training Quality Assurance body and oversees the accreditation and monitoring of training providers within its scope. So a construction employer can encounter both CETA and the QCTO in the same conversation, which does nothing for clarity.
Not sure what your own SETA has actually paid you? Send us a payroll summary and your SETA registration and we will tell you what you were entitled to and what was claimed.
Request a call backSo several organisations sit behind the word accredited, and they answer different questions. Asking a provider whether it is SETA accredited can produce a completely honest yes that tells you nothing about the course in front of you.
The merSETA grant guideline is precise about the current definition. A skills development provider is a legal entity accredited by the QCTO to offer occupational qualifications or part-qualifications registered on the Occupational Qualifications Sub-Framework. Accreditation by whom, for what, is the whole question.
What does accreditation actually attach to?
Not to the company. This is the single most useful thing to understand.
Accreditation is normally linked to a specific qualification, part-qualification or skills programme, its programme or qualification code, a delivery site, an approval period, an assessment arrangement, a learning mode, and the relevant quality council or historical quality-assurance arrangement.
Every one of those is a place where a real accreditation and the course being sold to you can come apart. A provider accredited for a qualification at its Johannesburg premises is not thereby accredited to deliver it at your factory in Bellville. An approval period that lapsed last year was valid when the certificate on the wall was printed. A provider accredited to teach a qualification is not necessarily accredited to assess it.
Which is why a logo, an accreditation number or a framed certificate on a website does not establish that every advertised course is credit-bearing. It establishes that something, once, was accredited.
Which five things should you ask for in writing?
The exact programme title and its code. Refuse broad descriptions. Safety course, welding certificate, business qualification, First Aid Level 1 and Red Seal course are not programme titles. A provider should be able to distinguish between a practical welding short course, an occupational welding qualification, trade-test preparation, coded-welding preparation and a national trade-test route. Those outcomes are not interchangeable and they do not cost the same, so the vagueness is rarely accidental.
Written proof of current scope. Ask for documentation showing the provider name, the accreditation or approval number, the programme title and code, the physical delivery address, the issue and expiry dates, any approval conditions, and whether another accredited provider is involved in delivery. The QCTO publishes databases of accredited skills development providers and assessment centres, so the claim is checkable against a source that is not the provider.
The qualification record itself. Check the programme against the relevant QCTO or SAQA record and confirm the official title, NQF level, credits, entry requirements, purpose, assessment requirements, registration status, any teach-out dates and which authority certifies it. A qualification appearing on the SAQA register does not prove that this provider may deliver it. Those are two separate checks and both have to pass.
The certificate the learner will receive. Ask before paying. The answer might be a provider attendance certificate, a certificate of competence, a statement of results, a QCTO occupational certificate, a national trade certificate, a coded-welder qualification record or something else entirely. An attendance certificate confirms that somebody attended. It is not a national qualification, a short welding course does not make somebody a Red Seal artisan, and ordinary occupational training does not create trade-test eligibility.
The assessment route. Some programmes are internally assessed. Others require an external assessment, a trade test, or External Integrated Summative Assessment through an accredited assessment centre. Assessment centre accreditation is specific to each occupational qualification. A provider who cannot tell you how the learner will be assessed has not thought the programme through to its end, which is exactly where programmes fail.
Why did so many historical qualifications fall away?
Because the landscape genuinely moved, and some providers are still selling from the old catalogue.
Services SETA stopped accepting provider accreditation applications against all historically registered qualifications from 1 September 2022, because those qualifications were expiring in June 2023. Applications already received by 31 August 2022 were still processed, and providers already accredited had until 30 June 2024 to enrol learners in historical qualifications. The focus moved to occupational qualifications, with accreditation for those running through the QCTO.
The scale of the rebuild is visible in the numbers. SAQA had registered 31 occupational qualifications for the Services SETA sector as at 31 January 2023, replacing a much larger historical set. A qualification your company trained people on five years ago may simply not exist in that form now.
This is the practical reason to check expiry dates rather than just accreditation numbers. A provider is not being dishonest by holding an accreditation that has since been superseded. It is just no longer the accreditation you need.
What does getting this wrong cost you?
Rarely the price of the course. Almost always something larger.
The first cost is on the B-BBEE scorecard, where what you spent matters less than what the spend was. Training that produced no credit-bearing outcome is categorised differently from training that led to a qualification or part-qualification on the NQF, and the points follow the category, not the invoice.
The second is in your grant claim. Where training reported in an Annual Training Report is verified, the questions are what the programme was, who delivered it and what the learner received. merSETA monitors the implementation of at least 20% of all mandatory grant submissions and reserves the right to verify any report. A verification that finds attendance certificates where the report claimed qualifications is a bad afternoon.
The third is the one nobody budgets for. A learner who completed a programme that turns out not to carry the credits they were promised has to do it again. You pay twice, and you have spent a year of that person's development on a certificate that does not move them.
Does unaccredited training have any value at all?
Yes, and the honest answer matters, because the opposite belief causes employers to stop reporting things they should report.
Plenty of genuinely useful training is not credit-bearing and was never intended to be. A supplier running a day on a new machine. An internal session on a revised method statement. A short course on a software package. The merSETA guideline recognises non-credit bearing short courses as a category in their own right, defines them as short learning programmes where credits are not awarded, and states that they can be funded through mandatory grants, discretionary grants and non-PIVOTAL programmes.
What changes is the ceiling. Non-PIVOTAL programmes are credit and non-credit bearing programmes that do not lead to qualifications or part-qualifications, and they still have to address the SETA's own objectives and priorities to count. So unaccredited training is reportable and fundable, but it will not do the work that a qualification does on a scorecard or in a skills pipeline.
The error is treating the two as substitutes. A training year made entirely of short courses is a compliant year with a low ceiling. A training year with no short courses at all is usually a year where somebody stopped recording the training that actually happened.
What does credit actually mean?
It is worth knowing the unit, because it is the thing you are buying.
One credit equates to ten notional hours of learning. Notional hours are an estimate of the total learning time an average learner needs to meet the defined outcomes, including contact time, research, assignments, structured learning in the workplace, individual study and group work.
That arithmetic is a useful sense check. A qualification carrying 120 credits implies roughly 1,200 notional hours of learning. A two-day workshop cannot deliver it, whatever the brochure implies, and a provider quoting a large credit total against a short contact period is describing something other than what you think you are buying.
Three checks worth running this week
Pull the last twelve months of training invoices and, for each one, write down the exact programme title and the certificate the learner received. Where you cannot fill in either column from your own records, that is the gap.
For every provider you intend to use again, ask for the accreditation document with the expiry date on it, and check the programme code against the QCTO or SAQA record rather than against the provider's own description.
Then check what you claimed. If training was reported to your SETA or counted towards the skills element of your scorecard on the basis of being accredited, and the accreditation turns out to be for a different programme, you would rather find that yourself than have it found for you.