CBTA isn't a grading system. It's a behaviour system!

Stuart Beech, Founder & CEO

When we speak to training teams about IE and pilot standardiation, it quickly becomes clear that alignment is not the core issue - the problem is competency understanding. Too often, recurrent training becomes a 'tick box' exercise, sim sessions are overloaded, and conversations that should be about behavioural change focus too much on grading.

We believe that unless IEs and pilots have mastery of the OBs and the KSA behind them, conversations around standardiation are less effective, and distract from the central issue: competency understanding.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (Doc 9868) defines competency in a way most CBTA and EBT programmes still don’t operationalise:

Competency is “manifested and observed through behaviours that mobilise the relevant Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) under specified conditions.”

Read that again. The two words that matter are: manifested and mobilise.

Manifested: Competency doesn’t live in a spreadsheet, a framework, or a grading scale. It only becomes real when it shows-up in action. It's not what we think a pilot knows or what we hope an instructor intends. It's what's actually demonstrated when it matters.

Mobilise: The behaviour is the visible tip of the iceberg. Underneath it, the pilot must mobilise KSA - in the moment, and often under pressure.

• Knowledge: what to do and why (TEM link, context, standards)

• Skills: the ability to execute (decision tools, communication techniques, metacognition)

• Attitude: intent and mindset that drives behaviour under stress

  
  

If training doesn’t deliberately build the KSA behind the OBs then you’re not developing competence, you’re simply recording outcomes.

The gap in many CBTA/EBT systems

Airlines often capture OBs only when performance is an outlier. But most pilots sit in the grade 3 middle where OB gaps remain unseen, untrained, and unresolved. That’s where safety margin and efficiency gains are being left behind.

How we fill the gap and embed meaningful CBTA/EBT

Resilient Pilot's app, Resilience Deck, is designed to develop OBs as KSA continuously.

We use a staged build:

1. Encode the knowledge (what the OB is + what “good” looks like)

2. Construct the skills (tools and techniques to execute it)

3. Align the attitude (intent under pressure)

4. Apply in scenario context (vSBT / scenario learning)

5. Facilitated reflection (root-cause at OB level)

6. Spiral reinforcement (repeat in new contexts so it compounds, not decays)

That’s Bloom’s taxonomy, adult learning, and neuroplasticity applied to CBTA.

When transitioning to CBTA or EBT, it's vital to remember that competence isn’t trained once. It’s built through repeated behavioural execution in context until it becomes reliable when the unexpected happens: KSA → OB → performance → resilience.

If you’re implementing CBTA/EBT, ask yourself this one question: Are you standardising grades…or developing behavioural competence?

Contact us to find out how we can support your transition to CBTA/EBT.