Promotional assessments

Running the same incident for every candidate, scoring it against the same criteria, and keeping a record that holds up if somebody questions the result.

What a promotional process has to survive

A promotional assessment is one of the few pieces of training a department does where the outcome may be challenged. Because of that, it has to meet a standard the rest of your training does not: every candidate needs the same incident, the same information at the same points, and the same scoring, and you need to be able to show afterward that this is what happened.

A tabletop exercise struggles here, because the scenario tends to drift as the day goes on. The fourth candidate gets a slightly different description than the first, the evaluators remember the strong answers from earlier and grade against them, and none of it is written down in a form anybody could review later.

How this helps

The scenario is a saved document, so every candidate gets exactly the same building, the same conditions, the same responding units and the same arrival times. Injects fire on the exercise clock rather than when an evaluator remembers to introduce them, which means the candidate who goes last faces the identical sequence as the one who went first.

Because you will want that scenario to stay unseen until the assessment, an admin can mark it admins only. This hides it from everyone else in the department, including members who otherwise have instructor access, so a candidate cannot study the exact scenario in advance. The drill you run from it stays private too, and so does its after-action review, which matters because a review replays the scenario in full and the candidate knows the drill code.

Each candidate's performance is scored against the criteria you set, and evaluations stay private until you decide to release them. This lets you complete the whole cycle before anybody sees a result, which is usually what a promotional process requires.

Afterward

When the cycle is finished you can share the scenario with the department so crews can learn from it, or release just one review while keeping the scenario itself unseen for the next candidate. Training hours count either way, so a candidate's time in the assessment appears in their record like any other drill.

If a result is ever questioned, you have the sealed record: the exact scene, every decision in order, the radio traffic transcribed, and the evaluation against the criteria. That is a considerably better position than a set of notes and a recollection. There is more detail in the documentation on private scenarios.

Seeing it for yourself

If this sounds like the problem you are trying to solve, the quickest way to judge it is to watch one drill from beginning to end. We will walk through building a scenario on an address you choose, running it live, and reading the after-action review afterward. Request a demo and we will email you to arrange a time, usually within 24 hours. One subscription includes everything described on this page, at $49 a month or $499 a year per block of 30 seats.