Walk into almost any warehouse and you’ll find counterbalance forklifts and reach trucks working side by side. Both are commonplace, both are familiar — and both need separate training. That second point is where a lot of operations get caught out.
An operator certified on a counterbalance is not certified to drive a reach truck. An operator certified on a reach truck is not certified to drive a counterbalance. HSE Approved Code of Practice L117 is clear: training must be appropriate to the type of equipment being used, and certification on one type doesn’t transfer to another. Letting someone operate a truck type they haven’t been trained on isn’t a grey area — it’s a breach of PUWER.
Why they need different training
A counterbalance forklift is the machine most people picture when they hear “forklift” — forks at the front, counterweight at the rear, used indoors and outdoors for loading, unloading, and moving pallets. Versatile, widely used, and most operators have a reasonable intuition about what it does.
A reach truck is a different machine entirely. It’s built for narrow-aisle racking environments, with a mast and forks that extend forward beyond the body of the truck, allowing operators to place and retrieve pallets from racking heights of 8–12 metres. Most are electric, most are operated standing, and most work in aisles that leave very little room for error.
The hazards of reach truck operation are genuinely distinct. Load placement errors at 10 metres can cause pallets to fall from height. The reach mechanism changes load centre dynamics in ways that don’t apply to counterbalance operation. Narrow-aisle navigation — sometimes under 2 metres wide — means a collision with a racking upright can destabilise an entire run. Battery management, operating position, mast extension behaviour — none of this is covered in counterbalance training, and none of it is intuitive without specific instruction.
Novice, experienced, or conversion — knowing which course applies
The right course depends on what your operator already has:
Novice courses are for operators with no prior formal training on the relevant truck type. They cover all three elements required under L117 — basic training, specific job training, and familiarisation — from the ground up.
Experienced operator courses are for people who’ve been driving a truck informally, without a formal qualification. They have practical experience, but no certification and probably gaps in their knowledge. This course formalises and fills that.
Conversion courses are for operators who are already qualified on one truck type and need to add another. A conversion course isn’t a short formality — it’s a focused training programme that covers everything specific to the new truck type. But it’s shorter than a full novice course because existing competence is recognised.
Refresher training is recommended every 3–5 years, or after an incident, a site change, or when a supervisor spots a deterioration in standard.
The audit most warehouses haven’t done
The most common compliance gap here isn’t a lack of training — it’s informal cross-training that was never documented or formalised. It’s the operator who was asked to “have a go” on the reach truck one day because it was busy, and has been using it ever since. It’s the team member who moved from a counterbalance to a reach truck when the operation changed, with no formal conversion. These situations are everywhere in busy logistics environments, and they represent real legal exposure if an incident occurs.
A quick audit of who’s operating what, against what certifications they actually hold, will almost always surface names that need a conversion or refresher course.
RTITB training at National Compliance Training
National Compliance Training delivers RTITB-accredited counterbalance and reach truck training at their Nuneaton training centre — close to the M1, M6, and M69 and accessible from Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, and across the Midlands — and on-site across the UK.
Courses available include counterbalance novice, reach truck novice, combined novice, experienced operator for both truck types, reach truck conversion for existing counterbalance operators, and refresher training for both. All training results in RTITB certification and complies with HSE L117.
