Planning Your Grade Assessment (GA)

Planning your assessments is a vital part of your Grade Assessment (GA). A clear and structured plan helps you stay on track throughout the process and ensures that all necessary competencies are covered. It also provides continuity if more than one Assessor supports you during your GA, as your plan acts as a consistent reference point.

Taking Responsibility for Your Progress

As the Candidate, the responsibility for starting and maintaining progress lies with you. Speak to your Supervisor early to arrange a time to plan your assessment journey together.

From experience, the best moments to do this are usually at the start of a trip, such as when a vessel leaves port, or during a pre-project meeting at headquarters before deployment. Early planning makes the rest of your GA much more efficient.

Accessing the MTCS Assessment Plan Template

You can use the MTCS Assessment Plan Template to guide your planning:

Log in to your MTCS Online account.
Select the Grade Assessment you’re working towards.
Under Supporting Documents (after Competencies), open Assessment Plan Template (PDF).

Your plan will outline which competencies are being assessed, through which activities, and the performance criteria each activity covers. The goal is to ensure every criterion is assessed at least once across your three chosen activities. Each criterion doesn’t need to be assessed three times — just once per overall plan.

What Your Plan Should Include

A complete Assessment Plan sets out:

What you’ll be assessed on
How you’ll be assessed
When the assessment will happen
Where the assessment will take place
Who will support and assess you

Your performance can be assessed through two main methods:

Observation (O): When your Assessor watches you perform a task.
Work Product (P): Any record or document showing work you’ve done (e.g., dive logs, fault logs, or repair reports).

Ideally, 70% of your assessments should be observation or work product based. Observation remains the strongest form of performance evidence.

Choosing Three Activities for Assessment

Selecting your three workplace activities is a key part of your plan. Each activity should demonstrate your skills in different contexts. The tasks under each activity contribute to meeting your performance criteria.

Example: Activity – Flowline Tie-In Job

Typical tasks might include:

Piloting and log keeping
Manipulator work
Routine ROV/LARS maintenance (winch, A-frame, tether management)
Fault-finding and equipment repair

All these could take place on one trip and count as a single activity.

Linking Competencies to Real Work

Another way to plan is to focus on a specific competence.
For example, in the ROV PTI Competencies, Competence 6 focuses on removing, testing, and inspecting auxiliary ROV equipment such as tooling and sensors.

Activities that might cover this competence include:

Removing, repairing, and refitting a manipulator arm
Removing, bench testing, and refitting a sonar (you cannot remove and refit the same sonar three times, a range of activities is required)
Fitting and testing a pipe tracker

In some cases, these tasks could all be completed during one trip. If your Assessor confirms the work meets the required standards, the competence may be complete. However, in most cases, achieving this range of evidence will take more than one offshore trip.

MTCS will soon release an Insight dedicated to examples of activities to support Candidates further in planning their GAs.

How Long You Have to Complete Your GA

MTCS allows Candidates 12 months to complete their Grade Assessment, though it can take longer. To help you get started early, documentation is accessible before course purchase. This means you can begin collecting evidence in advance.

When you’re confident you can complete the process within 12 months, enrol in your chosen course and start submitting evidence for verification and feedback.