Recognition of prior learning
Recognition of prior learning is a mapping exercise, not a favour.
We design and run recognition processes that hold a defensible line between a candidate's evidence and the requirements of a unit. Methodical on the paperwork, humane with the person.
Portfolio on one side, unit requirements on the other
Recognition of prior learning sounds generous and is often described that way, which does the process no favours. It is not a discount and it is not a courtesy extended to experienced people. It is an assessment, conducted against the same unit of competency and the same rules of evidence as any other assessment, with the difference that the evidence already exists rather than being generated inside a classroom.
The whole discipline lives in the mapping. On one side sits what the candidate can show: work products, employment records, supervisor observations, licences, prior study, things they made, decisions they signed. On the other side sit the elements, performance criteria, performance evidence, knowledge evidence and assessment conditions of the unit. Between the two there must be a line that a third party can follow without your help. Where the line cannot be drawn, the answer is not recognition, and pretending otherwise damages the candidate more than a straight refusal would.
Providers get into difficulty when the mapping is implied rather than written. An assessor who knows the industry can look at a portfolio and feel confident. Feeling confident is not a record. The mapping document is the artefact that makes the judgement reviewable later, by a moderator, by an auditor, or by the candidate themselves if they disagree with it.
What recognition is, and what it is not
Clarity here prevents most of the disputes. Recognition assesses competence against a standard. It does not award credit for time served, for job titles, or for being well regarded by a manager. It is also not a paperwork exercise in which the candidate assembles a large folder and the volume of the folder carries the argument. Thirty documents that evidence nothing specific are worth less than three that each map cleanly to a named requirement.
- Recognition of prior learning
- Assessment of a candidate's existing skills and knowledge against the requirements of a unit of competency.
- Credit transfer
- Recognition of a completed unit already awarded by another registered provider, which is a records process rather than an assessment.
- Portfolio
- The organised body of evidence a candidate presents, arranged against unit requirements rather than by date or by employer.
- Mapping
- The written link between each piece of evidence and the specific requirement it addresses, and the assessor's reasoning for the link.
- Gap training
- The targeted delivery arranged where evidence covers part of a unit but not all of it, so that the remainder is taught and assessed properly.
- Competency conversation
- A structured, recorded discussion in which an assessor probes the depth and currency of a candidate's knowledge.
- Third party report
- A structured statement from a workplace supervisor about performance the assessor did not personally observe.
Why currency is tested rather than assumed
Experience from a decade ago evidences something. It evidences that a person once performed a task in a workplace that once existed, under rules that may since have changed, with equipment that may since have been replaced. That is genuinely valuable and it is not the same as current competence, which is what a unit requires and what a certificate implies to whoever reads it later.
So currency gets tested rather than assumed, and it gets tested proportionately. In a field where the regulatory framework, the technology and the accepted safe practice have all moved, older evidence carries less weight and needs supplementing. In a field where the underlying task has been stable for thirty years, older evidence carries further. The assessor's reasoning about which situation applies belongs in the record, because it is a judgement and judgements should be visible.
This is also the kindest way to handle it. A candidate recognised on stale evidence walks into a workplace holding a document that says they can do something they can no longer do. That is a worse outcome for them than a conversation about a short piece of gap training.
The candidate experience, and why it should not feel like a trap
Many people arrive at recognition already braced for humiliation. They have been told the process is straightforward, then handed a sixty page evidence guide written in the language of the standards, with no example of what a good submission looks like and no named person to ask. Some of them are highly skilled workers who have not written anything longer than a message since school. They withdraw, and the sector records that as a candidate who lost interest.
A decent process tells the candidate at the start what will be asked of them, in ordinary words, with examples. It offers more than one way to present evidence, because a person who cannot write a five page account of their work can often demonstrate the same thing in a conversation, on site, or through what they have made. It gives them a single contact. It sets expectations about how long the assessment will take and what happens if the evidence is not sufficient, before that becomes a live question rather than after.
None of this lowers the standard. The standard is fixed by the unit. What changes is whether the process is testing the candidate's competence or testing their tolerance for administration.
Third party reports and workplace verification
Most recognition evidence describes performance the assessor did not see. That is the nature of it, and it means the mechanism for verifying workplace claims carries a great deal of weight. A third party report that asks a supervisor to tick agree or disagree against paraphrased performance criteria is close to worthless, because it invites agreement without requiring any specific recollection.
Reports worth having ask the supervisor to describe what they observed, how often, over what period, and in what circumstances, and they capture the supervisor's own position and their basis for knowing. They are followed up. A short verification call, recorded in the file, distinguishes a report the supervisor actually completed from one the candidate completed and the supervisor signed. We build these instruments and we test them against the situations where they are most likely to fail.
The competency conversation
A structured conversation is often the most informative part of a recognition assessment, and the most poorly recorded. Done well, it probes beneath the description of a task into the reasoning behind it: why that method rather than the alternative, what happens when the usual approach does not work, what the candidate would do differently now, what the rules require and what happens when they are not followed.
It needs a question set built from the knowledge evidence of the unit, room for the assessor to follow an answer where it leads, and a record that captures the substance of what was said rather than a tick against a topic. We write the question sets, brief the assessors on how to probe without leading, and design the recording format so the file shows what was actually asked and answered.
Where recognition is the wrong answer
Sometimes the honest advice is that recognition will cost the candidate more effort than study would, and deliver less. A candidate whose experience touches perhaps a third of a qualification will spend months assembling evidence for units that will still need gap training, and will arrive exhausted at roughly the point they could have reached by enrolling. Saying so early is a service.
It is also the wrong answer where the evidence cannot be obtained: a closed employer with no surviving records, a supervisor who cannot be contacted, work done informally with nothing to show. And it is the wrong answer where a candidate is being pushed towards it by someone else's interest rather than their own. We say so plainly, and we do not run a process we expect to fail so that the file can show it was offered.
What we do for providers
We design recognition processes end to end: candidate facing material in plain language, evidence guides with worked examples, mapping templates that make the assessor's reasoning visible, third party instruments, competency conversation question sets, and moderation arrangements so that two assessors reach comparable judgements. We train assessors in the parts that are genuinely difficult, particularly sufficiency and currency, where most inconsistency lives.
We do not claim this makes an organisation compliant, and we do not make predictions about what a regulator will decide, because those decisions belong to the regulator and nobody outside that process can promise an outcome. What a well built recognition process gives you is a set of judgements you can explain, in writing, months later, to someone who was not there.
Get the mapping right and everything else in recognition becomes straightforward.