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Why Writing Your CBA Alone Can Feel Overwhelming – And What You Can Do About It

If you’re an engineering graduate with three or more years of Canadian and/or international experience, and you’re preparing  your P.Eng. license application, you’ve likely heard of the Competency-Based Assessment (CBA). You may have even opened the CBA Applicant’s Guide, only to close it again feeling overwhelmed. You’re not alone.

Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) and most Canadian engineering regulators require you to demonstrate 48 months of engineering experience in a CBA document. In Ontario, PEO’s CBA has 34 competencies in 7 categories. That means telling detailed, technically sound, and well-structured stories that clearly illustrate a scenario, the actions you took, and the ensuing outcome. Writing these examples on your own can be confusing and frustrating, especially when you can’t tell if you’re meeting expectations.

What counts as a strong story? How do you demonstrate the right level of detail? What do validators and assessors want to see?

That’s exactly why the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, in collaboration with CareerCycles, created the Competency-Based Assessment (CBA) Workshops for P.Eng. Applicants. These live, interactive sessions (Workshops A & B, plus asynchronous materials) guide you through each part of the CBA process using practical tools and live demos.

Through the workshops, you’ll learn to use the Situation/Action/Outcome Model to bring clarity and structure to your examples, and get expert support from facilitator Mark Franklin, M.Ed., P.Eng., practice leader of CareerCycles.

Whether you’re just starting your CBA or stuck on how to finish, these workshops give you the skills and confidence to write and submit your best work and avoid rejection or delays.

Don’t try to do it alone, join us and take the next step toward your P.Eng. designation.

Next Session: June 11, 2025 (Workshop A)

You can register for the next workshop here.


Written by Mark Franklin M.Ed., P.Eng., Practice Leader and President of Career Cycles.

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