Assistant Well Logging Operator Licence Conditions in Qatar
October 6, 2026
10 min read
DITEC Experts, Radiation Protection Team, ALDuha Institute for Training and Environmental Consulting
The entry-level licence on a well logging crew
One point before anything else. Meeting the conditions in the Decision is what you can prepare for. Whether a licence is granted, and when, is a decision of the competent authority alone, and nothing in this explanation and nothing in any course is a commitment that a licence will be issued or that it will be issued within a given period. What this article does is set out the condition as the instrument states it and point to the training that bears on it.
The assistant is the third rung of the logging ladder in the schedule of Decision 4 of 2007, and of the three logging entries it is the only one that requires no prior experience, so a person who meets its four conditions and holds a general secondary certificate may be granted a licence that puts him beside a source container on a wellsite, inside a controlled area whose boundary and dose control are the licensee's responsibility and not his. The Decision is explicit about that: item 6, quoted here in full, has four conditions and an experience condition is not one of them.
That is not a licence to be careless, and we read no intention into it. Read item 6 against the two entries above it, and the structure is plain: the supervisor carries five years and a first university degree, the operator one or three years and a diploma or a secondary certificate, and the assistant no years at all. What item 6 requires of the assistant, besides the certificate and the logging course, is the radiation protection course in industrial applications and the prescribed medical examination, and that course is written in it in the same words as in paragraph B of the operator entry above. The protection duties the Law and the Regulation place on a licensee are unaffected and are a separate matter from the training conditions in this item. The prescribed medical examination is a fitness condition for the licence. It is not a protective barrier and does not stand in for the course.
The four conditions, and what each of them is for
Item 6 opens with the formula that opens all three well logging entries: the following conditions must be present in the person who is granted a licence to work as an assistant well logging operator. Then come four conditions. The academic condition is that he hold the general secondary certificate or its equivalent, with no field of study named. The logging condition is that he pass a training course in the field of well logging from an approved centre. The radiation protection condition is that he pass a training course in radiation protection in industrial applications from an approved centre. And the fourth is that he pass the prescribed medical examination.
Notice what the schedule reduces here and what it does not. The academic floor falls from a first university degree, in the supervisor entry, to a general secondary certificate. The logging course loses the word specialist, which appears in the supervisor entry and in paragraph B of the operator entry. The experience condition disappears entirely. And the radiation protection condition is written in exactly the same words as in paragraph B of the operator entry, without a single word removed. That is the clearest statement in the whole logging group about where the framework places the protection of an entry-level worker.
Two further features of item 6 are worth recording. The first is that item 6 is not split into practices before and after the Law: it is a single set of conditions, where item 5 above it carries two paragraphs. The second is that its academic condition is written without the phrase at minimum, where paragraph A of the operator entry writes the same certificate with that phrase. Both are differences in the wording of the instrument. We record them and we do not read a rule into either, which is the practice this series follows throughout, and if either point is material to your file it is a question for the Ministry.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the one thing employers get wrong on this entry. There is no condition in item 6 that a qualified person can satisfy on the assistant's behalf, and there is no condition in item 6 that gets easier because the assistant is supervised. Supervision is what the role is; it is not a substitute for either course or for the examination.
The assistant against the operator
These two entries are the two licences present on almost every logging crew, and the table sets them against each other, taking the operator on paragraph B because that is the paragraph that applies to a practice set up after the Law. It is a reading of items 5 and 6 of the industrial applications, both quoted in full in the verified text behind this series, and nothing is added to it.
Items 5 and 6, the operator on paragraph B
| Condition | Assistant, item 6 | Operator, item 5 paragraph B |
|---|---|---|
| Academic floor | General secondary certificate or its equivalent, no field named, and the phrase at minimum is not used | Diploma in a branch of engineering or sciences, two years after general secondary, at minimum |
| Well logging course | A training course in the field of well logging from an approved centre | A specialist training course in the field of well logging from an approved centre |
| Industrial radiation protection course | Required, in the same words as for the operator | Required |
| Experience | No experience condition in the item | Practical experience in well logging of not less than one year |
| Prescribed medical examination | Required | Required |
| Split into practices before and after the Law | Not split, a single set of conditions | Split into paragraph A and paragraph B |
What an employer should do with this entry
Because item 6 is the entry point, it is where an employer's own practice matters most and where the Decision says least. The points below are the Institute's working practice, and the items set out in this explanation require none of them.
An employer checklist for the assistant entry
Do not read the absence of an experience condition as a lower standard of care
- The Decision sets conditions for a licence. It does not set the standard of supervision an employer owes a new worker, and nothing in item 6 displaces the licensee obligations in the Law and the Regulation.
- In our reviews, the assistant is the role most often placed on a crew before the radiation protection course has been passed, on the reasoning that he is only assisting. The item removed the experience condition and kept that course word for word.
Keep the logging course and the radiation protection course as two records
- They are two of the four conditions, with different subjects, and each is to come from an approved centre in the words of the item. A single combined certificate answers one condition and leaves the other without evidence, so a file with four conditions evidences three.
Decide the progression route before the assistant asks about it
- An assistant who wants to become an operator on paragraph B needs a diploma in a branch of engineering or sciences, a specialist logging course, and a year of practical experience in well logging. None of the three is produced by time on a crew alone, and the records that evidence the year have to exist while the year is being worked.
Settle what the medical examination is once; have each person examined
- The condition is identical in all three logging entries: that he pass the prescribed medical examination. Ask the Ministry once which examination is prescribed and at what interval, and that answer is the same for the whole crew.
- The examination itself is a condition on an individual, so one person's examination does not stand in for another's, and each licence holder keeps his own record.
Questions we are asked about this item
Is it correct that an assistant needs no experience at all?
The item as it stands lists four conditions and none of them is an experience condition, and that is what distinguishes it from the two entries above it. What follows from that is narrow: no period of prior service has to be evidenced for this licence. It does not follow that a new assistant may be used as an operator, and it does not follow that the employer's own duties are reduced.
Does the assistant also need the industrial radiation protection course?
Yes, and in the same words as the operator. The Decision lowers the academic floor for the assistant, drops the word specialist from the logging course and removes the experience condition, and it leaves the radiation protection condition exactly as it stands in paragraph B of the entry above. A crew member who has not passed it has not met one of the four conditions of his own licence.
Which paragraph applies to a new assistant we are hiring now?
Item 6 has no paragraphs. Unlike the operator entry above it, it is a single set of four conditions with no division into practices before and after the Law, so the question does not arise on this entry. If you are reading a summary that gives the assistant well logging operator two paragraphs, that is not from the words of item 6.
Can an assistant work alone on a wellsite?
Item 6 is a licence to work as an assistant well logging operator, and the function the title names is assisting. How the crew is composed on a specific job is governed by the conditions of your own licence, the licensee obligations of the facility, and any condition the authority attaches when it grants the licence, and those are read together rather than from this item alone.
Is a logging course from any training provider acceptable?
The condition names the subject and the source of the course together: a training course in the field of well logging from an approved centre. The item does not say who gives that approval, and does not say whether it attaches to a centre generally or to a particular course, so we do not answer for the Ministry. The question is put to it in the Arabic words of the item, naming the specific course and the specific centre together, and the reply is kept in writing. Ask before the course is paid for rather than after the certificate is in the file.
How the Institute can help
Two findings recur on assistant files. The first is a crew list that puts a new assistant on a job before the radiation protection course has been passed, on the reasoning that the item has no experience condition, which confuses the one condition the Decision removed with the one it kept word for word. The second is a combined certificate offered against both the logging course condition and the radiation protection condition, so a file with four conditions evidences three.
The Institute delivers radiation protection training for industrial applications, reviews a crew's licence files against item 6 condition by condition, advises on the records that let an assistant later evidence the year of practical experience the operator entry requires, and drafts the enquiry to the Ministry on the prescribed medical examination and on the standing of a named course. The specialist well logging training the Decision names is a separate qualification obtained from a provider that offers it, and the Institute does not issue it. What the Institute delivers is the radiation protection course in industrial applications that the operator and assistant entries name as a subject; whether a particular course at a particular centre satisfies the approved-centre limb of the condition is for the Ministry to say.
Scope of what the Institute does: training and consulting. Field radiation surveys are carried out through specialist partners. The Institute does not carry out laboratory analysis, instrument calibration or equipment testing.
A technical note. The conditions in this Decision are licensing conditions, not site work instructions. Meeting them, and the licence that may follow, replaces nothing in operational protection. A logging run lowers a sealed source into a borehole and brings it back, and the pattern that recurs in incidents in this practice is a source that did not come back and a crew that did not establish that it had not. The controlled area is monitored at its boundary with a survey meter that is within its calibration validity and response-checked before the run, and the run is not finished, and the source container is not handled as empty or as full, until a measurement says which it is. That is not inferred from a cable depth counter, from a mechanical indicator, or from the run having gone as planned. If the measurement does not establish that the source is in its container, the operation stops where it is, no one approaches the tool, and the licensee acts on his own emergency arrangements and notifies the Ministry. A source that may not have been recovered is not a matter to be settled on the wellsite between shifts. These are obligations on the licensee under the Law, the Regulation and the conditions of his own licence, and their place is not this Decision.
A note on two words the Decision uses for the source of a course. In the well logging entries the Decision asks for a course from a centre it describes with an Arabic word that this explanation renders as approved, and in one place, the supervisor entry, it asks instead for the course to come from a body described with that same word. The items set out in this explanation do not define either term, do not say who gives that approval, and do not say whether it is a general status or given for a particular course. In the Decision this description qualifies the provider of the training and no other party. The English word is a rendering chosen for this explanation and is not a term of art: our practical reading is to ask in the Arabic wording of the Decision, naming the specific course and the specific provider, and to keep the answer in writing, because what the instrument leaves open the authority settles. The Institute is a licensed training provider and describes itself that way and no other way.
A note on one place in the text. In the printed copy of the schedule that we hold, the tail of the examination condition in paragraph A of the well logging operator entry arrives damaged: the last word has collapsed in the print. We therefore quote from that condition only the two parts that are clean, and we do not quote its tail or build any reading on its wording. Anyone who intends to rely on that alternative should read the condition on the page image of the Official Gazette, or ask the Ministry for the wording in force, before acting on it.
A note on the authority named in the text. The word the Decision uses for the authority is the Council. It is the word of a 2007 instrument whose preamble refers to the Executive Regulation issued by decision of the President of the Supreme Council for the Environment and Natural Reserves, number 4 of 2003. The body that word names no longer exists. Competence today sits with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, and the unit concerned is named in the organisational decisions as the Radiation Protection Department. The word Council is kept only where this explanation renders what the instrument itself says, because that is the instrument's own word; in the Institute's own advice it is written as the Ministry. Read Council as the Ministry throughout.
This explanation is published for awareness by the radiation protection team at ALDuha Institute for Training and Environmental Consulting. The English text is an explanation, not a certified translation: the Arabic text published in the Official Gazette governs in case of any difference, and the official Arabic wording of every condition discussed here is quoted in full on the Arabic version of this article. This explanation is introductory. It is not a legal opinion, it does not replace the conditions of your own licence, and it does not replace review by the regulator. Last updated 6 October 2026.