Two things: a full electrical qualification, then a charge point specific Level 3 award in addition to it. There is no route that skips the first part.
What has changed is who needs to hold the second part. Since 1 October 2026 it has been every individual doing the work, not one supervisor covering a team. That single change makes the hireable pool smaller than the qualified pool, and most hiring plans have not been rewritten for it.
What is the baseline?
A qualified electrician. In practice that means a Level 3 electrotechnical qualification or an NVQ Level 3, plus the current edition of the wiring regulations, BS 7671. If someone does not have that, charge point work is not a short course away. It is an apprenticeship away.
This is the part people underestimate when they read that the sector is short of installers. The shortage is real, but it does not lower the entry bar. It comes after a trade that already takes three or four years to qualify into.
What is the charge point specific part?
A Level 3 award in EV charging equipment installation, from an awarding body on the accepted list. The common ones are City and Guilds 2921-34, the Level 3 award covering design and installation for domestic and small commercial, and the EAL Level 3 Award in the Installation of Electric Vehicle Charging Points.
The accepted list is not fixed, which is the trap. Two further City and Guilds qualifications, 2919-01 and 2919-02, were added to it in March 2026. An award someone took a few years ago may still be perfectly valid, and a hiring manager checking a certificate against a list they downloaded last year may still get the answer wrong.
What changed on 1 October 2026?
Competence became individual rather than borrowed.
Under the previous arrangement a registered firm could put semi-skilled operatives on charge point work under a Qualified Supervisor who held the qualification. Since 1 October 2026 every employed person undertaking the work holds their own Level 3 award, and so does the supervisor. The same rule landed at the same time on solar PV, electrical energy storage and micro wind, and on periodic inspection and testing.
Be precise about what the rule is. This is the Electrotechnical Assessment Specification, the standard the certification bodies assess against, so the consequence of falling short is that the work category comes off a firm’s scope of registration rather than anything criminal. In practice that is the same thing, because losing the category means losing the ability to certify the work.
The requirement was published in October 2024 with a transition period, which ended on 30 September 2026.
What does this do to hiring?
It moved the constraint from experience to certification, on a fixed date, in four shortage trades at once.
The obvious effect is that a firm running a national installation programme can no longer staff it with a small number of certified people and a larger number of capable ones. Every van needs its own award. If you have planned headcount around crews rather than around certified individuals, the number you need is higher than the number in the plan.
The less obvious effect is on the second hand market for people. Solar, storage and charging were hit simultaneously, and they recruit from the same pool of electricians. Anyone holding awards across more than one of those four categories became disproportionately valuable in the same week, and they know it.
There is also a quieter one worth watching. Periodic inspection and testing was caught by the same deadline, and it is the work that keeps a lot of contracting businesses’ revenue steady. Firms that have to choose where to put their training budget may well protect inspection before they protect charging.
How should you read a CV against this?
Ask for the award, not the experience.
“Five years in EV charging” and “holds a current accepted Level 3 award” are different claims and only one of them is now the qualifying one. Plenty of genuinely experienced installers have worked under a supervisor’s registration for years and hold nothing in their own name. They are not bad candidates. They are candidates with a training cost and a lead time attached, and you want to know that before an offer rather than after.
Three questions get you there:
- Which award do you hold, and which awarding body issued it?
- Is it in your own name, or did you work under your employer’s Qualified Supervisor?
- Which of the four low carbon categories are you covered for?
The third one tells you what everybody else is offering them.
If you are the electrician reading this
Get the award in your own name, and get your employer to pay for it. A business that will not fund it now the rule is in force is telling you what it thinks your value is.
Then take the second category. Someone certified for charging and storage is competing in a much smaller field than someone certified for charging, and the pay follows the scarcity rather than the job title.
Frequently asked questions
Can I install charge points without being an electrician? No. The charge point award is taken in addition to a full electrical qualification and does not replace any part of it.
Does my existing award still count after October 2026? If it appears on the current accepted qualifications list, yes. Check the certificate against the current list rather than assuming, because the list has been added to as recently as March 2026.
Does this apply in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? The Electrotechnical Assessment Specification is used by the certification bodies across the UK. Building regulations and the surrounding scheme requirements differ by nation, so confirm the scheme position where you work.
We subcontract our installation. Does this affect us? Yes, indirectly and quite sharply. Your subcontractors are carrying the same deadline, and their capacity is now set by how many of their people hold an award individually rather than by how many they employ.
If you are staffing installation and want to know what the certified pool actually looks like in your region rather than the qualified one, book a discovery call. Half an hour, and you get the market read whether you work with us or not.
Sources
- NICEIC, EAS changes: what you need to know, page updated 10 June 2026
- IET, Electrotechnical Assessment Specification, June 2026 edition, replacing the October 2024 edition
- City and Guilds, 2921 Electric Vehicle Charging qualification suite
- Net Zero Evolution market intelligence across 13 EV charging markets, reviewed monthly