The core loop

Blank page to submission-ready, five steps at a time

A Competency-Based Assessment is 22 to 34 separate written examples, each judged against a published rubric. CBA Pro turns that into one repeatable loop you run per competency — with exactly one thing to do at every point in it.

  • Steps 1 and 2 are unmetered — explore before you spend anything
  • One pulsing next action at all times, never two
  • Step back at any point; nothing you have written is lost
Competency 3.2 · Progressive responsibility
  1. 1Select best experienceContinue
  2. 2Answer missing detailsFree
  3. 3Generate preliminary draft1 credit
  4. 4Review and improve1 credit
  5. 5Finalize draftOn demand
Mark competency completeFinish step 1 first

What the competency workspace actually is

Most applicants stall on a CBA for a structural reason, not a skill reason: they are asked to produce dozens of short, evidence-heavy essays with no feedback loop until an assessor returns comments months later. The workspace replaces that with a five-step sequence you run once per competency — Select best experience, Answer missing details, Generate preliminary draft, Review and improve, Finalize draft — then mark it complete and score it.

Each step is a real screen with a real output, not a progress bar. Step 1 ranks your own recorded work experiences against the competency in front of you. Step 2 asks the questions that competency's rubric implies. Step 3 writes a Situation–Action–Outcome draft inside your regulator's character limit. Step 4 marks that draft up. Step 5 is where you edit, recheck and finish.

The workflow is deliberately linear but never locked: you can walk back to step 2, add a detail you remembered, and come forward again without losing the draft you already have. Every version is kept.

How one competency moves through it

  1. 1

    1 · Select best experience — free

    The AI ranks the work experiences you have recorded against this competency and returns exactly three, rated honestly for closeness, including the weak one. You pick the evidence; the model only sorts it.

  2. 2

    2 · Answer missing details — free

    Questions generated from this competency's own Reviewer Expectations, Indicators and Common Weaknesses — one direct question per unproven item, in the competency's own vocabulary.

  3. 3

    3 · Generate preliminary draft

    A complete Situation / Action / Outcome inside your regulator's character limit. Anything the model cannot know from your answers comes back as a bracketed placeholder, never a guess.

  4. 4

    4 · Review and improve

    A reviewer pass over your own draft: comments anchored to the exact words they refer to, each with a suggested rewrite you can accept in one click.

  5. 5

    5 · Finalize draft

    Fill the placeholders one at a time, edit freely, and recheck on demand. When the draft earns it, 'Mark competency complete' turns primary and starts pulsing.

Why this beats writing it in a document

The first two steps are free

Ranking and question generation are unmetered. You can open a competency, see which of your projects actually fits it, and read the questions it raises without spending a credit or committing to anything.

One control glows at a time

Two things pointing at once is no guidance at all. The workspace shows a single pulsing next action, plus at most one corner toast telling you what to do and where the control is.

The goal stays on screen

'Mark competency complete' is pinned first in the rail the whole time — but it is readiness-aware. Until the draft earns it, it stays outlined with a hint naming exactly what stands in the way.

It retires itself

The guided prompts switch off after your second completed competency, with a one-time note and a link to bring them back. It is a wizard for the first two, not permanent furniture.

What a good competency-based assessment example looks like

Assessors are not reading for prose quality. They are checking four things: that the example is a specific event rather than a job description, that your individual contribution is separable from your team's, that there is real technical depth behind the decision you describe, and that an outcome is evidenced rather than asserted. Those four failure modes account for most of the comments applicants get back.

The five-step structure exists because each of them is caught at a different point. Choosing the wrong project is a step 1 problem. Missing technical depth is a step 2 problem — the questions push on exactly the indicators the competency lists. Unevidenced outcomes get flagged in step 4. A generic job-description tone shows up in the submit-readiness grade.

This is also why the same workflow works whether you are writing your first competency-based assessment example or rebuilding one that came back with assessor comments. Start at step 1 with a better project, or start at step 4 with the draft you already have — the loop is the same.

Trusted by engineers across Canada

M

M. Ibrahim

This was a wonderful experience. Hossein and Jenny were very helpful and prompt to reply to my emails and questions. Hossein got on a call with me before enrolling just to answer my questions. The review for my CBA questions was detailed, thorough with clear direction on what needs to be done to improve, which made it very easy for me to fix my answers. They gave me a time for looking into my CBA questions. They ended up delivering earlier than promised. Finally, they are very fairly priced. Definitely recommend their service for anyone looking to get someone to assess their CBA answers.

1 week ago

The five-step workspace — questions applicants ask

It is a tool. You choose which of your own work experiences to use, you answer the questions about what you actually did, and you edit and approve the final wording. CBA Pro structures the work, drafts from your answers, reviews the result and grades it — but the experience and the final words are yours. We do not ghostwrite CBAs.

Most applicants get their first competency to a submission-ready state in well under an hour once their work experiences are recorded, and get faster from there because steps 1 and 2 get quicker as the AI has more of your history to rank. The slowest part is almost always gathering the specific facts — dates, standards, measured outcomes — which is why the placeholders exist.

Yes, at any time, and nothing is lost. Every draft is saved as an immutable version, and any text sitting in the editor is persisted before an AI action runs, so stepping back never discards what you typed.

No. You can paste in a draft you have already written and start at the review step — the reviewer pass, placeholder wizard, submit-readiness grade and self-assessment score all work on your own text.

In short

CBA Pro's competency workspace is a five-step loop run once per competency in a Canadian P.Eng Competency-Based Assessment: (1) select the best matching work experience, (2) answer gap questions generated from the competency's own indicators, (3) generate a Situation–Action–Outcome draft within the regulator's character limit, (4) run a reviewer pass with comments anchored to the draft text, and (5) finalize. Steps 1 and 2 are free of charge. The applicant supplies all experience and approves all wording.

Run one full competency, free

Every step, on a real competency, with no card. Everything you write carries over the moment you upgrade.