By Jon Vanstone, chair, Certass TA.

Over the past few months there has been a great deal of conversation around the revised Mandatory Technical Competencies, and amongst all of it one remark keeps surfacing, usually from someone who has every right to make it.

“I’ve been fitting windows for 30 years. Why do I need to prove I know what I’m doing?”

It is an entirely understandable reaction, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. Anyone who has spent decades in this trade has earned something no classroom can hand over.

They have worked through changing markets, products and customer expectations, solved problems that appear in no textbook, and built the judgement that only comes from doing the job in all weathers, year after year. That experience is genuinely valuable, and it should not be underestimated.

What is worth pausing on, though, is what experience actually is. It is tempting to picture it as a tally of the years we have been at something, as if time alone were the qualification. In practice it is more than time served, because experience is the ability to adapt, to take in what has changed, and to make better decisions because of everything you have seen along the way.

Consider someone who really has been installing windows for 30 years, and think how much has shifted beneath their feet since. Thermal performance has been transformed, low emissivity glass has become the norm, warm edge spacer bars arrived, Part L has been rewritten more than once, Part F pushed ventilation and trickle vents to the front of every survey, safety glazing requirements have tightened, and whole product ranges have come and gone. The way a window is fitted today is not the way it was fitted in the mid 90s, and that is entirely to the good.

The experienced installers still thriving have not managed it by carrying on exactly as they always did. They have thrived precisely because they adapted every time the industry moved on, and that, rather than the number on the calendar, is what their 30 years actually represent.
Which is where the real point lies, and it is one that sometimes gets lost. Nobody serious is questioning the value of experience, in fact quite the opposite. The revised MTCs recognise that genuine competence is built from skills, knowledge and practical experience working together, with no single strand replacing another.

Seen in that light, showing an understanding of today’s Building Regulations is not an invitation to start again from scratch. It simply acknowledges that the regulations, products and expectations around the work have kept evolving, as they have at every stage of a long career.

I have often found that the best installers are not the ones who claim to know everything, but the ones who stay curious. They ask why something has changed rather than just what has changed, and they treat learning not as something that ended the day they became competent, but as part of staying competent.

That is true of almost every serious occupation. Surgeons keep up their professional development for as long as they operate, pilots sit regular assessments, gas engineers requalify, and nobody imagines any of it diminishes their experience.

It is what maintaining high standards looks like in any field that keeps changing, and there is no good reason our sector should be the exception.

Experience has always been one of glazing’s greatest strengths, giving installers confidence, judgement and the ability to handle situations no training course could fully recreate, and those qualities matter every bit as much now as they did 30 years ago. What has changed is the world in which that experience is applied.

Buildings perform differently, regulations keep moving, homeowner expectations have never been higher, and a decision taken on site now carries consequences that reach well beyond the frame in front of you. Keeping pace with all of that does not diminish the value of experience, it is the clearest possible demonstration of it.

Perhaps that is the honest way to read the whole conversation around the revised MTCs. They are not asking anyone to prove that 30 years counted for nothing. They are recognising that the very reason those 30 years matter is that they add up to 30 years of learning, adapting and quietly getting better.

Looked at in that way, continuous learning was never something separate from experience. It is what experience has been all along.