BY: Bob Glenn, Editor and Publisher

The NCCCO Foundation declares that its vision is, “To be recognized as the foremost resource for advancing industry safety, expanding workforce knowledge, and supporting career development in the crane and load handling industry.” It pursues fulfillment of that vision through specific initiatives in Workforce Development, Education and Research. We’ve seen a lot of new things from the Foundation over the last year, so it seemed like a good time to take stock of the programs they have underway and see what else to expect as this year unfolds.

T.J. Cantwell’s Role and the Foundation’s Growth Since 2022

Bob Glenn, Wire Rope Exchange (WRE): To get us started, tell me about your professional background and what you bring to the Foundation.

T.J. Cantwell, NCCCO Foundation: I’ve spent a couple of decades working in nonprofit management — trade associations, national charities, national programs. Nothing related to cranes. But what connects all of it is experience with early-stage organizations that have a mission and goals but need a framework and structure to actually get there. That’s really my background — building the operational foundation for nonprofits that are ready to grow. And that’s exactly what I found here.

I took over as Executive Director in 2022 when Graham Brent (who started the Foundation) retired. Since then, we’ve added new Foundation board members and established several new committees, bringing in a much broader group of subject matter experts to contribute their expertise as we develop programs. We’ve built out more organizational structure, which I think puts us in a stronger position to produce the resources and programs this industry needs.

Safety and Education: Monthly Webinars

Wire Rope Exchange: Let’s talk through your key initiative areas. Starting with Safety and Education — what are you trying to accomplish with your webinars?

T.J. Cantwell: Our goal is to share as much useful information with the industry as possible — and really beyond just the traditional crane industry. We want to reach anyone working in or around cranes on a job site, helping them better understand safety requirements, regulatory requirements, safety hazards, roles and responsibilities — anything that can educate them and improve safety overall. We’re also using webinars to share data and information related to workforce development.

We’re aiming to do monthly webinars going forward and just started rolling that out this year. We also made the decision last year to sunset our annual industry forum. The reason was simple: in our hybrid format, we had more people participating online than in person for sessions that ran about four hours total across multiple topics. Managing both audiences simultaneously was difficult — someone couldn’t talk, couldn’t hear, or there were technical issues. Going fully online through the webinar format solves that and allows us to reach a much broader audience.

Rather than having five or six sessions a year at the industry forum, this lets us do much more. And we’re not just trying to reach crane rental companies and operators — we want to reach general contractors, site owners, subcontractors, and anyone who uses a crane even occasionally. All of this content is recorded, so it’s accessible to a wider audience after the fact as well.

Wire Rope Exchange: One challenge I’ve heard expressed is that the lifting industry doesn’t have its own standalone identity. Instead, it lives inside other industries as a service to them. Many users aren’t really in the lifting and rigging business full time. They hire it out because they don’t know much about it. If people in construction, offshore energy, and similar fields can learn more about the specific demands and hazards of crane operations, they’ll probably make better decisions about how to manage those services.

T.J. Cantwell: Exactly. That’s precisely our goal — provide the education and resources so those people are better prepared to manage their businesses and crane operations more safely. And as you say, there are people involved in crane use on a regular basis who still don’t fully understand their own roles and responsibilities. You can’t just hire a crane company and an operator and consider yourself covered. There’s a whole range of things that need to be addressed — for safety, legal, and regulatory reasons — and we want to raise awareness about that.

Workforce Development: MyCraneCareer

Wire Rope Exchange: Let’s talk about workforce development. Tell me about MyCraneCareer (www.MyCraneCareer.org) – what’s going on there, and what’s new?

T.J. Cantwell: We continue to build it out. Through our research and conversations with existing operators, we’ve identified three primary groups — now a fourth — that we believe have the right qualities and transferable skills to succeed in this industry: women already working in the trades, CDL truck drivers, and general construction laborers. Veterans are the fourth group we’re now developing content for.

MyCraneCareer remains a one-stop shop for someone with no industry connections to learn what careers are available, what they can earn, and what skills they need. But we’re now building out targeted pages specifically for each of those groups, designed to help people self-identify as a strong potential fit. The goal is that someone in one of those groups sees content and thinks: ‘That’s me. I can see myself doing this.’

Everything we’re building is intended to be free — for individuals looking to enter the industry and for any employer trying to recruit into crane-related roles. We’ve been running digital ad campaigns and getting strong traction: people see something about the industry, click through to MyCraneCareer, and start learning how to get started and find jobs. Other trades have done a much better job of recruiting this way. We need to do the same.

Crane operators tend to get certified in their late twenties to mid-thirties — so we’re targeting people who already have some experience and background that would translate well, but just don’t know that this opportunity exists. I can’t tell you how many people have told me: ‘If I’d known about this ten or fifteen years earlier, I would have gotten into crane operating much sooner. I just didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t know how to start.’

Workforce Development: Recruitment Playbook

Wire Rope Exchange: This seems especially well-suited to someone who has a couple of years of work experience and is thinking, ‘I have a job, but I don’t really have a career.’ That feels like a high-yield opportunity — there are plenty of people out there who could be doing something more.

T.J. Cantwell: Exactly. And we do support youth awareness efforts too — we’ve done things with Future Farmers of America and SkillsUSA and will continue to. But our primary focus is on career transition: people moving to a more rewarding long-term path, not kids who are years away from the workforce.

Related to this, we’re releasing a recruitment playbook for the industry — it came out March 18th along with a webinar. It’s built on our research and A/B testing of messaging in digital ad campaigns across all three of our target groups. The idea is to show the industry how to recruit these people in a more strategic and scalable way.

Right now, a lot of recruitment in this industry happens through personal connections — someone like Jim has been around for years, he spots Julie because she’s a truck driver and he can tell she’ll be great, and eventually she gets in the crane seat. That works, but it’s not scalable. We’re trying to help make it scalable.

The playbook includes practical tools, images, and tested messaging — what worked on Google, what worked on Meta and Instagram, what didn’t, what keywords resonate, and even job ad copy guidance. Don’t just say ‘crane job, good money.’ People want to hear about building their community, career advancement, moving up over time. We have proof that messaging around those themes actually resonates and drives results.

Workforce Development: Training and Certification Scholarships

Wire Rope Exchange: Tell me about the scholarship programs you are offering.

T.J. Cantwell: We’ve been running scholarships in earnest for about a year and a half. There are two separate tracks. The first is our crane operator training and certification scholarship, which we run in a spring and fall cycle. It’s designed to help people who want to enter the industry get quality training and earn their NCCCO certification when they couldn’t otherwise afford it. We’re offering up to $10,000 per individual, which covers most or all of the training cost at the majority of our accredited training providers.

We’ve now done three cycles with a fourth underway. Our last cycle had 34 applications, which was very competitive. Our workforce development committee reviews all applications, and although we know there are hundreds of quality training providers, we require applicants to use one of the NCCCO EDU-accredited training providers — that way we’re confident the provider has gone through a third-party vetting process and trainees are going to a quality program.

We’re starting to highlight success stories from scholarship recipients — several from the most recent group have already found employment and are well into their careers. When you can tell those individual stories, it becomes a much more compelling program to talk about.

The second track is a rigging and signaling training and certification scholarship, opening in May. This one is aimed at people who are brand new to the industry and want to establish a real foundation before pursuing crane operator certification. Entry-level candidates who already hold a CCO rigging and signaling certification stand out significantly when applying for oiler, rigger, or signal person positions. I’ve spoken with employers who confirmed they’d move a certified candidate to the top of their list over someone who’s never been trained. We believe this will not only increase the talent pipeline, but improve overall crew safety — because these new entrants will come in with a solid understanding of the fundamentals right from the start.

Research Initiatives: Workforce Research

Wire Rope Exchange: Tell me about your research initiatives — what you’ve done and what’s coming next.

T.J. Cantwell: We’re focusing our research in two areas: workforce development and safety. When I arrived in 2022, there were a lot of anecdotes – ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ or ‘this is what I think is wrong’ – but not much hard data. I wanted to change that.

We started with a large workforce survey in 2023, which came out in 2024. We surveyed all NCCCO certificate holders — over 100,000 people — and received about 2,000 responses, which is a strong return rate. It covered everything: where they trained, job satisfaction, why they chose this profession, concerns, demographics. That data is now publicly available and gave us a solid baseline.

We then followed that with research on similar roles — looking at other occupations that share the same qualities, skills, and abilities as crane operators, but that you wouldn’t typically think of as a pipeline. Aviation mechanics and airport ground crew, for example, have a lot of transferable skills. That report has also been published.

Now we’re launching a new research project focused specifically on barriers to entry, which we expect to release around Q3 of 2026. We’re going to go talk to people who started the process of entering the industry but didn’t follow through — people who signed up for training and dropped out, or who registered for NCCCO exams but never completed certification. We want to understand why. Was the test too hard? Did they run out of time? Did another industry pull them away with a faster path to income? The anecdotal answer I’ve heard is that people hear about apprenticeship timelines or up-front costs and get recruited away by, say, electrical work that offers faster entry. We want to know if that’s actually true and how significant it is.

Research Initiatives: Safety Research

T.J. Cantwell: On the safety side, we’ve partnered with the National Safety Council, whose researchers have extensive experience studying hazards across industries. Together, we’ve surveyed the industry — operators and others — to identify and rank what they consider the most significant safety hazards specific to crane operations. That work produced a hazard identification and control tool, available on our website, where users can select the hazards most relevant to their operations and receive a menu of solutions organized by hierarchy of controls: administrative solutions, engineering controls, PPE, and more. The goal is to help safety-conscious operators and companies go beyond the minimum and keep improving.

We now have two new safety research projects underway, both targeting a second-half 2026 release. The first will survey a cross-section of industry workers — both NCCCO-certified professionals and construction safety directors — to quantify the impact of quality training and certification on safety outcomes. We want to be able to show, with data, that having certified and well-trained workers on your job site reduces incidents. The second report will focus specifically on the state of rigging and signaling in the industry.

What we’re hearing from people in the field is that rigging and signaling practices vary enormously — not just region to region, but literally job site to job site. Operators are arriving on sites and being introduced to riggers and signal persons who’ve received anywhere from no formal training to a fifteen-minute briefing that morning. We want to establish a data-backed baseline of what’s actually happening out there, document what the problems are, and then make the case for what needs to change. Because we know from accident data that many crane incidents don’t start with the equipment or the operator, they start with rigging and signaling. And unlike crane operators, riggers and signal persons currently have no certification requirement. We need to at least establish what’s going wrong before we can tell people what to do about it.

Wire Rope Exchange: Rigging is one of those things that looks simple from the outside – hook, sling, load, done – but there are simple ways to make very serious mistakes.

T.J. Cantwell: Absolutely. Dangerous, costly, and potentially deadly mistakes. And there’s not nearly enough awareness of that. That’s exactly what we’re hoping to bring to light.

The Most Similar Directory and CTAG

Wire Rope Exchange: Tell me about the Most Similar Directory – I wasn’t familiar with that at all.

T.J. Cantwell: It’s been around since 2017. It originated as a working group under NCCCO in response to OSHA’s 2018 final rule requiring crane operators in construction to hold certification. The issue OSHA itself acknowledged when that rule came out was that not every piece of lifting equipment had a direct certification pathway — some machines are just too unique or unusual to fall cleanly into an existing certification category.

OSHA’s position was essentially that they’ll accept the most similar existing certification for equipment that doesn’t have its own. But they also said they didn’t have the expertise to make that determination themselves, so they asked NCCCO to establish a group to do it. Graham Brent stepped up and created the Crane Type Advisory Group – the CTAG. That group became part of the Foundation in 2019.

What CTAG does is review requests from the public for equipment that doesn’t fit standard categories — a digger derrick manufactured without an auger or pole guides, for example. CCO first checks whether an existing certification already applies. If not, CTAG convenes, evaluates the equipment in detail, and determines the most similar certification that would apply. The Most Similar Directory is the published result of those determinations, so that operators, companies, and inspectors can look up what OSHA-compliant certification is appropriate for a given piece of equipment. A new piece of unusual lifting equipment comes up for review a couple of times a year, which keeps the CTAG active and the directory current.

Impressions from CONEXPO-CON-AGG

Wire Rope Exchange: Tell me about your experience at ConExpo. It’s always an amazing event – what did you see and do?

T.J. Cantwell: I was primarily managing the crane, rigging, and aerial lift education track — introducing about half the sessions, with Jason Bell from the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association handling many others. All of our sessions went well, but a few really stood out. The session on inspection changes related to B30.5 drew over a hundred attendees, and people walked away with significantly more information than they probably expected. That kind of content really lands with audiences who might not work with cranes every day.

Derek Sather’s session on roles and responsibilities was a great example of why we do this. When you get people into the room who aren’t crane specialists and they start asking questions at the end — ‘Wait, I didn’t realize that was my responsibility?’ — that’s exactly the audience we need to reach. They leave, they get it, and hopefully they go back and tell others.

Beyond the sessions, I was using ConExpo to make connections for a new initiative I’m building — an industry advisory group made up of current or former crane operators who’ve moved into other roles like safety director or sales, and who are willing to answer questions from people trying to break into the industry. We’re planning to launch this very soon. The idea is that someone comes to MyCraneCareer, expresses real interest, and rather than just getting a website, they can email us and we’ll connect them with a knowledgeable person who can explain the realities: where to find training in their area, what the various options for entry are like going union, seeking private training, or direct hire, how the career progression actually works. It’s not a full mentorship — more of a guide to point them in the right direction. We’re piloting it small, with the intention to grow it in 2027 if it works well.

Wire Rope Exchange: That’s a brilliant idea! You’re providing a personal contact for someone who might not know anyone in the industry – not so much a mentor, but someone to tell you the two or three questions you really need to be asking as you learn about the industry.

T.J. Cantwell: Exactly. Someone to tell you the realities, give you basic advice on how to get in, and help you understand what you’re actually getting into. That’s the goal.

Technology in the Lifting and Rigging Industry

Wire Rope Exchange: One topic worth exploring for a future webinar is how technology is changing the way people work in this industry. We’ve written quite a lot about this, and there’s much more to uncover. It might appeal to a younger audience too, since there’s increasingly a technological dimension to a lot of roles.

T.J. Cantwell: I agree — technology is something I hear more and more about. And I think the right framing is: what can technology do to make our work easier, safer, and better — not to replace what skilled people do. A lot of people are concerned about that, but there are things computers will never fully replicate. The question is how to use them well.

One thing we’re already seeing is the digitization of certifications and inspection records. Instead of paper files following equipment around, you have everything in a database — accessible from a phone — so you can track every asset you own and pull its full inspection history instantly. Things like the Green Sticker by CraneSafe QR code and CCO CertConnect initiatives are pointing in that direction. Those are practical technology applications that are useful right now.

Wire Rope Exchange: Thank you for taking time to share all of this – we are really impressed with the breadth of initiatives you’re taking on and the direction of your work.

T.J. Cantwell: My pleasure, enjoyed speaking with you!

This story appears in the March/April 2026 Issue of Wire Rope Exchange. Read the entire issue online at this link!

Those interested in volunteering or supporting the work of the NCCCO Foundation can email info@ncccofoundation.org, All the resources and information mentioned can be accessed for free at the NCCCO Foundation’s primary website  www.ncccofoundation.org or their crane career website www.mycranecareer.org.