You must have heard of APEGS CBA, and many questions related to this must be popping up in your mind. Therefore, we have written this blog to let you know what it is and the initial steps you need to take before you use it.

What is CBA, and why does APEGS use it?

Competency-based assessment or the CBA system is an online system that APEGS uses to assess the work experience of a candidate.

To have your work experience assessed, you need to provide validated examples to demonstrate each of the competencies. For that, it’s a must for you to have a minimum of four years of work experience validated in this system.

Having told you about this system and its use, let’s know about the initial steps you need to take before your application.

Initial steps:

You must do the following things before you apply to get your experience assessed:

Make sure that your CV is up-to-date and lists your key job roles, projects and attainments over the period of work experience you claim (a minimum of four years). It will save your time in completing the Employment History and choosing projects to use as examples in the Competency Self-Assessment. Remember that a project doesn’t need to be completed to use it as a competency example.

Make sure that you maintain a record of all of your CPD goals and activities for a competency assessment.

Become familiar with the Competency Framework and its Indicators/Workplace Examples (including any discipline specific indicators that are available for your area of practice for engineering).

For major learning activities, have some time to reflect briefly about the key learning that you earned including how it may have impacted your practice and helped you demonstrate competency within any of the Competency Categories.

There is an optional tutorial that is available in the CBA system for engineering applicants in the drop-down menu after you have logged in. A geoscientist tutorial is coming in the future.

Roles and responsibilities of an applicant:

The following are your responsibilities if you use this system:

·        Provide work experience details through the APEGS Competency Assessment System. The details must include work experience chronology and specific examples to address each Competency.

·        Give a self-assessed Competence Level for each Competency as per the Competency Rating Scale.

·        Provide the authority with contact information for a minimum of four individuals to act as validators to verify and offer feedback on the competency assessment. For those validators who were not given specific competencies to validate, they need to provide an overall assessment. For instance, if you provided examples from only one supervisor, that supervisor validates all the examples and the other three validators offer general comments and answer the general reference questions that are in the APEGS CBA system. You can’t act as your own validator.

·        You also need to provide extra information when the authority asks for it.