Candidate handbook

Foundation credentials carry no formal prerequisites: any candidate may register and sit, whatever their qualifications and however they prepared. Each credential page states the professional experience candidates are expected to have — an expectation, not a gate.

An endorsement requires a current Council credential; grades above Foundation state their requirements when their syllabi are published. Membership is never required to sit anything, and buys no advantage in assessment.

Registration is open through the candidate portal. The fee schedule — each track’s examination fee and the member rate — is opening soon, published ahead of the October 2026 examination window, and nothing is payable until it is published and you register for a sitting. Employer-funded cohorts run on examination licences issued to the organisation; the licence pays the fee and nothing else.

The refund policy governs cancellation and rescheduling, and the candidate support policy governs what happens when illness or emergency intervenes.

Examinations are delivered remotely and proctored by a specialist provider; the technical requirements and the conduct of a session are published with the timetable. The rules themselves are already fixed:

• you sit alone, under your own verified identity;
• only the materials the examination brief permits may be used;
• examination content is confidential — disclosing, soliciting, or reusing it outside the examination is a breach of the Code of Professional Conduct;
• suspected misconduct is investigated before any result is issued, and no adverse finding is made without the candidate being heard.

Examination format varies by track and is fixed when that track’s syllabus is issued. Scenario work is the core of every paper, and may be combined with other applied question types. What does not vary is what is being tested: applying a framework to a deployment, rather than recalling what the framework says.

Every script is marked twice, in a fixed order: an AI assessor first, producing a provisional mark, and an independent human assessor second. A result is issued only when both marks concur; where they diverge, the human assessor reviews the divergence and the human determination is final. No result is issued on automated marking alone, and no adverse decision — a fail, a suspension, a withdrawal — is ever made without a human assessor.

A successful candidate receives the credential, its badge, and a public register entry valid for two years — see revalidation. An unsuccessful candidate receives their result with domain-level feedback and may re-sit after 21 days, up to three attempts in twelve months, each on a different form of the paper at the standard examination fee.