v2.2: Practice attempts, stage order and prerequisites

Practise without it counting

Some skills take more than the minimum number of supervised attempts before someone feels confident. Others benefit from practice ahead of a final assessment, or from a Supervisor observing different scenarios from those seen in the required assessments.

Compassly now supports practice attempts on an assessment that is repeated a set number of times. Practice attempts never change the result or appear in Dashboard reports.

Competency authors choose whether practice is switched off, available once the real attempts are finished, or available at any time. Compassly makes it clear before each attempt that it is practice, so nobody submits a real assessment by mistake.

Control the order of stages

The order in which a competency is completed is an important part of its governance. Competency authors can now make a group of stages wait until the groups it depends on are finished, so learning is completed before practical assessments, and declarations are made by the right people in the right order.

If someone tries to start too early, Compassly highlights the stages that still need completing first.

Prerequisite competencies

Some competencies depend on others. Competency authors can now link a competency to any number of others, so it cannot be started, or cannot be signed off, until those prerequisites are complete. A link can also be for context only, with no effect on progress.

Prerequisites must still be valid, not expired or invalidated, so people build on the basics they have demonstrated.

Preview and prepare for assessments

Supervisees can now preview the assessments their Supervisor will assess them against, and prepare in advance. They can open a stage they don't complete themselves and read through every question, without starting a record.

The competency screen also gives more context on stages someone doesn't complete themselves. Tapping one explains whether a supervisor or the person themselves needs to complete it.

Other improvements

If a competency needs to start again, for example so it can be recorded retrospectively, a Manager can now reset it directly in the app. The earlier record is kept in the competency's history rather than deleted.

When someone holds several job descriptions that share a competency, it is grouped into a single entry, with each job description it comes from listed beneath it. Archived job descriptions now show who archived them. We've also made some formatting improvements, such as clearer wording and neater headers and footers within stages.