Planning your assessments is a vital stage of your Grade Assessment (GA), as it provides a clear and laid out plan of progression, enabling you to stay on track throughout. Your Assessment Plan provides cover if you end up having multiple Assessors throughout your GA process, as a comprehensive plan ensures you will cover all required bases.
As the Candidate, starting and staying on track with your Grade Assessment is ultimately your responsibility.
You should talk to your Supervisor as early as you can and arrange a time for you both to plan and discuss the oncoming process.
We know from experience that there are normally opportune moments at the beginning of any trip to sit down with your Supervisor and make the plan. These opportune moments can be once the vessel leaves port and is heading to its project site, another could be a project meeting which takes place at headquarters before you go to the vessel.
We do provide a template plan for Candidates to use:
- Login to your MTCS Online account
- Select which Grade Assessment you require
- The PDF is available under ‘Supporting Documents’ after ‘Competencies’ –> ASSESSMENT PLAN TEMPLATE
Your plan will include which Competencies are to be assessed through which activity and the Performance Criteria you’ll cover. You are aiming to have all the Performance Criteria assessed at least once over three activities. This does not mean each criteria must be assessed three times.
What Your Plan Will Cover:
- What you will be assessed on
- How you will be assessed
- When you will be assessed
- Where you will be assessed
- Who will help and assess you
Your performance can be assessed through Observation (O) or a Work Product (P) and later, throughout your Grade Assessment the method you were assessed by must be logged on your ‘Signed Competence’ sheet.
Observation is the primary performance evidence we want to see, with 70% of your overall assessments being observation and work product based ideally.
Observation – When your Assessor has seen you performing a task.
Work Product – Anything you have done on the job which has a paper trail (e.g. dive logs, fault log from repairing an ROV)
Identifying 3 Activities to Assess Your Performance
The three workplace activities can cause some initial confusion.
You want to choose three activities which will show your skills used in a range of ways. The tasks in each activity will be skills based and will help towards ticking off the Performance Criteria for each competence, for example:
ACTIVITY = Flowline Tie-In Job
TASKS will typically include:
- Piloting and log keeping
- Manipulator work
- Routine maintenance on the ROV/LARS (launch and recovery system – winch, A frame, tether management system)
- Fault-Finding (if something goes wrong on the equipment)
The above could be covered in one trip and count as one activity.
Another approach is to look at a specific competence
For example, in the ROV PTI Competencies, Competence 6 is all about removing, testing and inspecting auxiliary equipment on ROVs. This may include ROV Tooling and Sensors for example:
Activities that cover this competence may include:
- Removing, repairing and re-fitting a manipulator arm
- Removing, bench testing and re-fitting a sonar – *It is not acceptable to remove and refit the same sonar three times. This does not provide sufficient range to deem you competent!*
- Fitting and testing a Pipe tracker.
It may be possible to complete all these activities during one trip and if your Assessor believes you have done this to the standards required on the project, then it may complete the competence. This however is still quite a large range of activities and probably unlikely on one routine offshore trip.
We are going to be releasing an Insight shortly which is dedicated to examples of activities, so look out for it if you feel you need more information on the matter before embarking in the planning of your Grade Assessment.
Did you know?
MTCS allow Candidates 12 months to complete their GA, however it can take longer. Due to this we allow Candidates access to documentation before even purchasing the course. This enables Candidates to begin their assessments and, when confident they can finish within a year, they purchase the course and start uploading evidence for verification and feedback.
How it works:
- Register with MTCS Online
- Access ‘Guidance Docs’
- Go to GA Documentation, which is available to download.
- Start your assessments.
- Then enrol and purchase the course of your choosing.
- Start submitting evidence for verification and feedback.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact our team – enquiries@MTCS.info
