The wrong project is the most expensive mistake in a CBA
Every competency you write is only as strong as the experience behind it. CBA Pro ranks the roles you have actually held against the competency in front of you and hands back exactly three candidates — with an honest closeness rating on each.
- Exactly three matches, not a ranked list of everything
- The weak candidate is shown, and labelled weak
- Role and employer are never paraphrased — those are the facts a match is judged on
Ranked against competency 3.2
Three candidates — not a ranked list of everything. The weak one is shown, and labelled weak.
Ranking your experience, not inventing it
Before you can demonstrate an engineering competency, you have to decide which piece of your own history demonstrates it. Applicants routinely burn a strong project on a competency it only half fits, then find they have nothing left for the competency it would have carried outright.
CBA Pro reads the work experiences you have recorded — employer, role, dates, project, and the duties you wrote in your own words — and scores each against the competency you have opened. It returns three: typically one strong, one workable, one weak, so you can see the shape of the trade-off rather than just the top result.
Each card carries a semantic icon read from your own wording (a rail project gets a train, a wayfinding scope a signpost, water works a droplet), a closeness rating, and a Canadian-context flag — which matters for regulators like APEGA that require a set number of Canadian-equivalent competencies.
How the match is made
- 1
You build the evidence base first
Up to 15 work-experience records, added by hand or imported from your CV. Drafting unlocks at three, because below three the AI cannot tell a strong match from the only match available.
- 2
Each competency is scored against every record
The competency's description, indicators and reviewer expectations are compared against your recorded duties — not against a generic job title.
- 3
Three come back, rated honestly
High, medium and low closeness, with the reasoning behind each. The model is instructed to report a weak match as weak rather than talk it up.
- 4
You expand and read before you commit
Expanding a card switches to a two-column reading view with your own duties text on the left and the other candidates in a rail, so you can compare before choosing.
Why three, and why honest
A ranked list of everything is not a decision
Fifteen options sorted by score puts the work back on you. Three candidates spanning the range of closeness is a choice you can actually make in under a minute.
The weak match earns its place
Seeing why a project is a poor fit for this competency is often what tells you which competency it should be used for instead.
Nothing is clamped
Role titles and employer names are never shortened or rephrased in the match cards. Those are the facts you are judging the match on, so they are shown exactly as you recorded them.
The gate is explained, not just enforced
The three-experience minimum is stated with its reason, and the Continue button is visible from the start — disabled, with the reason underneath. A button that only appears once you have done the right thing cannot tell you what that is.
Mapping engineering competencies to real work
Canadian regulators assess engineering competence through evidence of what you personally did, not through a statement that you are capable of it. That is the whole premise of a competency-based assessment: the burden is on the applicant to produce a specific, dated, attributable event for each competency in the framework.
In practice this means your competency list and your project list have to be reconciled before any writing happens. Internationally trained engineers feel this most sharply — the work is there, but it is described in the vocabulary of another jurisdiction, and the mapping to a Canadian framework is not obvious.
The matcher works from your own duties text rather than from job titles precisely for that reason. A 'Site Engineer' in one country and a 'Field Engineer' in another may both have carried the design change that proves progressive responsibility; the title will never tell you that, and the description will.
Trusted by engineers across Canada
Sadegh Behboudian
“Using CBA Pro by CertNova Software Solutions helped me get my P.Eng. approved on the first attempt without any CBA rejections. What surprised me most was that the challenge wasn't my experience, it was how to present it properly. Having the right structure and guidance made the entire process much more manageable. Definitely saved me time and avoided the usual back-and-forth revisions.”
3 months ago
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
Nahal Nobahar
“I recently used this service to review and strengthen my competency submissions for my P.Eng. application, and I had a very positive experience. Reza and the team provided detailed and thoughtful feedback on my existing drafts, helping me clearly understand what was missing and what needed improvement to meet the expectations of the P.Eng. assessment process. They didn't just correct wording, they guided me on how to better structure my responses, highlight my individual contributions, and align my examples with the required competencies. What I found especially valuable was their ability to point out gaps in my explanations and suggest exactly what kind of technical details, context, and outcomes should be included. Their feedback made it much easier to refine my responses and present my experience in a clear, concise, and professional way. Overall, this service was extremely helpful for improving both the quality and clarity of my submission. I would recommend it to anyone who is working toward their P.Eng. designation and wants expert guidance to strengthen their application.”
4 months ago
Next in CBA Pro
Your CV in, structured evidence out
Upload your résumé and every proposed record opens for your review — gaps ringed amber, nothing written to your account until you say so.
Learn moreA five-step workspace per competency
Match your experience, close the gaps, draft, review, finalize. The screen always answers “what do I do next?” — and steps 1 and 2 cost nothing.
Learn moreAPEGA 3.2 is not PEO 3.2
Your association sets the competency catalog, the count, the character limits and the prompt library. All 12 Canadian regulators are selectable.
Learn moreExperience matching — questions applicants ask
Three is the minimum before drafting unlocks, and you can record up to fifteen. Three is a real threshold rather than an arbitrary one: with fewer, the ranking has nothing meaningful to choose between, and every competency would return the same project.
Yes, and most applicants do — a large project usually carries several competencies. What you cannot do is submit the same example text twice; each competency needs its own specific situation, action and outcome drawn from that project.
It still counts, and the match cards flag Canadian context explicitly so you can see your coverage at a glance. Some regulators — APEGA among them — require a minimum number of competencies demonstrated in a Canadian or Canadian-equivalent setting, so knowing which of your examples qualify is part of planning the submission.
No. It ranks and explains; you choose. This is deliberate — the choice of evidence is the part of a CBA that has to be yours, both ethically and because you are the only one who knows what you actually did.
In short
CBA Pro's experience matching ranks a P.Eng applicant's own recorded work experiences against each competency in their regulator's framework and returns exactly three candidates rated for closeness (high, medium, low) with a Canadian-context flag. Drafting unlocks at three recorded experiences and up to fifteen can be stored. The applicant selects the experience; the AI only ranks what the applicant has recorded.
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