How to prove 50% NWSA certification to a general contractor

The requirement is one sentence: at least half the tower workers on an AT&T site must hold valid NWSA credentials, and the general contractor is responsible for verifying it. It has been carrier policy for years. What is new, since the NATE–AT&T agreement took effect in June 2026, is that the turf vendor who used to sit in the middle of that conversation is gone, and the GC now asks you directly.

So what does "proof" actually mean, and what does it take to produce it in an afternoon?

What a GC is really asking

When a GC asks you to confirm certification, they are not asking whether your people have been trained. They are asking a narrower question, and it has four parts:

Who specifically is going to this site? Not your headcount — the four names on the truck Thursday morning.
Which of them hold a current credential right now? Not "took the course," not "passed in 2023." Current on the day of the work.
Can you show it? A document, a record, something that survives being forwarded.
Can you show it before the crew rolls? Proof after the fact is a finding, not a clearance.

The 50% is computed against the crew on site, not against your company. A company that is 70% certified overall can still fail on a specific day by sending the wrong four people. This is the part most contractors get wrong: they track a percentage when the thing that matters is a roster.

Why the folder of cert-card photos fails

Nearly everyone starts here — a shared drive, a folder per person, photos of the cards. It fails in four specific ways.

Expiry is invisible. A photo of a card does not tell you it lapsed last month. You find out when somebody reads the small print, usually the wrong somebody.

The gaps do not appear. A folder of certificates only contains people who have certificates. The climber who never completed the course has no folder, so he is invisible in exactly the record you would use to check. You cannot see an absence in a list of things that are present.

It is not per-site. The folder tells you about the company. The GC is asking about a crew.

It ages badly. Somebody has to remember to add the new card, remove the old one, and do it for every person, forever. That job is real work and it is nobody's job.

What a defensible record looks like

Whatever system you use — and this is achievable with discipline and a spreadsheet, it is just tedious — a record that answers a GC has these properties:

It is sourced, not retyped. Credentials that come from the training provider's own system cannot drift from reality the way a hand-keyed spreadsheet does. If you retype expiry dates, you will eventually retype one wrong, and you will not know which.

It knows about people with nothing on file. Your roster is the list of people, and the certifications hang off it — not the other way round. That single inversion is what makes gaps visible.

It warns before it lapses, not after. A credential that expires in six weeks is a scheduling problem. The same credential expiring yesterday is a stand-down. Sixty days of warning is roughly the distance between those two situations.

It answers per project. "Who is assigned to this site, and are they current?" should be one question, not a cross-reference between an assignment sheet and a certificate folder.

It produces something sendable. A screenshot, an export, a PDF — something you can attach to a reply.

The five-minute audit

Before you buy or build anything, do this. It takes an afternoon and it is usually uncomfortable.

List every person who climbs. Every one, including the guy who only helps out occasionally.
Next to each name, write the credential and the expiry date, from the certificate itself, not from memory.
Mark anyone with no entry.
Count the percentage current. Then count it again for each of the crews you actually dispatch as a unit.

Most contractors doing this for the first time find two things: a handful of credentials that expired without anyone noticing, and at least one person nobody realized had nothing on file. Both are cheap to fix in August and expensive to discover on site.

Do not forget the second half

Certification is one of two things the new framework pushes onto you. The other is the work product — the closeout package, read now by someone one layer closer to the carrier. The two are related more than they look: both are questions of whether you can produce evidence on demand, and both used to be somebody else's problem.

Mastlens syncs credentials nightly from Safety LMS / Comtrain, parses certificates from other issuers out of uploaded PDFs and photos, and shows a per-project view of who is current — including the people with nothing on file. See features, or start a free trial.