Probationary Qualibat Qualification: Getting Certified When Your Company Is Brand New

You have just set up your construction company. You know the trade — you practised it for years elsewhere — but the company itself has no completed sites to its name. Yet Qualibat requires references for works carried out over the last four years, executed by the company itself. Dead end? No: the rules cover this exact case, under the name probationary qualification (qualification probatoire).

What Qualibat normally requires — and why a new company hits a wall

Criteria derive from the French standard NF X50-091, with additional requirements for certain RGE qualifications (Reconnu Garant de l’Environnement, the state-recognised mark for energy renovation work). They fall into three blocks: administrative and legal, financial, technical.

It is the technical block that stops young companies. The company must produce as complete a list as possible of works carried out in the relevant activity over the last four years, stating for each the nature and value of the works, the place and date of execution, and the names and addresses of the client (maître d’ouvrage) and of the project manager (maître d’œuvre). Representative reference sites are required and must be technically substantiated, notably by certificates of satisfactory completion — and Qualibat contacts some clients directly.

Two points that cost dearly when discovered late:

• Only works executed directly by the company, with its own staff and its own equipment, count as references. A subcontracted site is not your reference.
• The financial block rests on overall turnover for the last two complete financial years, broken down by the activity applied for. A company created last year has none.

In other words, a recent company is penalised not on its competence, but on its ability to document that competence in its own name.

The probationary qualification: what the rules say

Article 7 of Qualibat’s general rules addresses this head-on. A probationary qualification may be granted:

• to newly created companies;
• to existing companies wishing to extend their field of activity;
• and where the references submitted were judged insufficient for a full qualification, including at review stage, the company meeting all other applicable requirements.

Two examples are given: the absence of recent references or of a sufficient number of them, and references that do not reach the required technical level.

The qualification is granted for two years, non-renewable, after the competent review commission has ruled on:

• the personal track record of the directors and the evidence they bring, from a technical, ethical and financial standpoint;
• the company’s staff and equipment resources.

The reasoning is straightforward: lacking a company history, the commission looks at the history of the people and at the reality of the production capacity. That is why a tradesperson who spent fifteen years as a qualified employee has a strong probationary file, and why a project holder with no trade background does not.

What is not relaxed

A crucial point, often misread: the probationary route relaxes only the references requirement. Every other criterion applies in full: registration with the trade and companies register (Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés) or the trades register (Répertoire des Métiers), the company identification number in the national business register, a declaration that the company is not in liquidation, the absence of any management ban or conviction affecting the directors, tax compliance, membership and up-to-date contributions to social bodies (URSSAF, and the construction industry paid-leave fund where applicable), a public liability and construction liability insurance contract covering precisely the specialities applied for, a claims-history certificate issued by the insurer.

To which is added a document new founders systematically forget: the identities of the legal and technical managers, with copies of their diplomas or evidence of professional experience. On a probationary file, that document carries the demonstration of competence in place of completed sites.

Another rule: the probationary route does not apply where the company submits, even on a first application, a complete file containing sufficient references. You do not choose this route; the commission applies it when it finds the gap.

Probationary, temporary, full: the three regimes

	Full qualification	Probationary qualification	Temporary qualification
Situation covered	Sufficient references in number and technical level	Newly created company, extension of activity, insufficient references	Directors who held similar roles in a qualified company placed in judicial liquidation less than three years ago
Duration	Up to four years (set by the applicable standard)	Two years, non-renewable	One year, renewable once
Basis of the decision	Complete file: administrative, financial, technical, references	Personal track record of the directors, staff and equipment resources	Same, with reinforced monitoring
Monitoring	Annual follow-up, year-stamped certificate	Annual follow-up, year-stamped certificate	Enhanced administrative and financial monitoring, at least twice a year
Exit	Review at expiry	Move to full qualification as soon as references are sufficient	Return to the ordinary regime

What the probationary route allows — and what it does not guarantee

RGE status. The order of 1 December 2015, which sets the qualification criteria opening entitlement to energy renovation aid, expressly provides that in the absence of references a probationary qualification may be granted provided it does not exceed two years. The route is open — but the other requirements hold: competence of the technical referent and on-site completion checks, at least one within the first twenty-four months. On a two-year probationary qualification that audit necessarily falls inside the period: your first RGE site must be beyond reproach. The training side is set out on our page on approved RGE training.

Public procurement. A contracting authority may require professional qualification certificates issued by independent bodies, under the order of 22 March 2019 listing the information and documents that may be requested from candidates. It must then accept any equivalent means of proof. A probationary certificate is a Qualibat certificate: it puts you in the directory and in consultations, without exempting you from demonstrating your capacity by other means.

Annual follow-up. Like any qualification, the probationary one is subject to annual follow-up: a questionnaire on administrative and legal criteria and on staff and equipment resources conditions the issue of the year-stamped certificate, and failing to respond leads to suspension and then removal — see our article on renewal and annual follow-up.

Turning a probationary qualification into a full one

The rules are clear: within the maximum two-year period, the qualification may be granted without limitation other than those set by the general rules, as soon as the company produces references judged sufficient in both number and technical level. No need to wait for the deadline: as soon as the file holds up, apply for the upgrade. The method comes down to three habits, to adopt from your very first site:

1. One file per site: detailed quotation, dated photographs, execution drawings or calculation notes, invoice, handover report, contact details of the client and the project manager.
2. A certificate of satisfactory completion requested at handover, not six months later — it is the document that technically substantiates the reference, and the hardest to obtain after the fact.
3. Filing by target qualification code, so you can check continuously that every code applied for is covered. Code selection logic is set out in our guide to the Qualibat nomenclature.

Mind the calendar: the review file must be returned complete at the latest five months before the qualification expires; beyond that date Qualibat does not guarantee a decision before expiry. On a two-year probationary qualification, that means closing the file in month nineteen.

The mistakes that get a new company’s file rejected

• Counting subcontracted sites as references. Only works executed with your own staff and equipment count; a high volume of subcontracting triggers requests for further information.
• Reassigning sites completed under a former employer to the new company. Those belong to the directors’ personal track record — present them as such, in the section on managers’ competence.
• Badly scoped insurance. The construction liability contract must expressly cover the specialities applied for; a generic certificate sends the file back.
• Aiming too wide. Every code is paid for every year: the full budget is calculated line by line, and a collection of probationary codes with no sites in the pipeline is a two-year trap.

The processing route itself — company account, submission, commission — is identical to that of an established company: see our guide to obtaining the Qualibat qualification.

And at the other qualification bodies

The probationary logic is not specific to Qualibat: the bodies that award RGE qualifications apply the same framework derived from the order of 1 December 2015. Qualifelec for electrical trades, Qualit’EnR for renewable energy, Certibat and Cequami within their own scopes. The choice turns on your trade and target markets, not on the supposed leniency of one body over another: our comparison of Qualibat, Qualifelec and Qualit’EnR sets out the criteria, and our article on Certibat and Cequami covers the certification side.

What research says about the liability of newness

The difficulty a recent company faces in gaining recognition has a name in organisational sociology. John Freeman, Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan established it in 1983 in the American Sociological Review (“The Liability of Newness: Age Dependence in Organizational Death Rates”): across three populations of organisations, the death rate declines with age — young structures fail more often, for want of legitimacy and established relationships (see the study).

Hence the value of an external signal. Toby Stuart, Ha Hoang and Ralph Hybels showed in 1999 in Administrative Science Quarterly (“Interorganizational Endorsements and the Performance of Entrepreneurial Ventures”) that young companies backed by prominent partners gain access to resources faster than comparable ventures (see the study). A probationary qualification is exactly that: an independent third party attesting, before the market has seen it for itself, that the structure and the people are credible.

Take action

If your company has fewer than two complete financial years behind it, do not give up: build the file around your directors’ personal track record, a precise inventory of your staff and equipment, construction insurance naming your specialities, and apply. Then treat the two years as a countdown — one file per site, a certificate of satisfactory completion at handover, review file closed in month nineteen. The full overview of the scheme is on our page on Qualibat qualification and the RGE mark.