What is the AssessAll Capability Framework (AACF)?

The AACF in one sentence

The AssessAll Capability Framework (AACF) is the competency model that sits behind every assessment on the platform: an original set of 29 workplace competencies, organised into five domains, that every score, report, and Skill Passport entry maps back to.

A capability framework in general is a structured answer to the question "what does good look like in this job?" — a named list of competencies with definitions and level descriptions. The AACF is AssessAll's answer, built so that results from different assessments accumulate onto one comparable profile instead of living as disconnected test scores.

The five domains

The 29 competencies group into five domains, ordered roughly from the inside out: Self & Identity (self-awareness, adaptability, learning agility — how you run yourself), Thinking & Judgment (analysis, decision-making, prioritisation), People & Influence (communication, coaching, motivation, negotiation), Execution & Change (accountability, delegation, delivering through change), and Commercial & Client (customer, market, and value focus).

Every competency has a plain-language definition and four scored bands — Developing (0–39), Emerging (40–59), Strong (60–79), and Exceptional (80–100) — each with a written anchor describing what someone at that band actually does, not just a number. Reports quote the anchor, so a 62 on Empowerment & Delegation reads as a behaviour description rather than a bare score.

Aligned to public frameworks, not copied from them

Each AACF competency carries a published crosswalk to five government and public competency frameworks: O*NET (United States), ESCO (European Union), the UK Civil Service Success Profiles behaviours, Australia's Integrated Leadership System, and Canada's Key Leadership Competencies.

The alignment runs per competency, not per domain — so an HR team that already runs on ESCO or Success Profiles can read an AssessAll report in their own framework's vocabulary. The AACF is aligned to these frameworks rather than derived from them: the competencies, definitions, and level anchors are original and written for assessment, which is what lets every item type on the platform score against them consistently.

How assessments map to the framework

Every assessment on AssessAll tags its items to AACF competencies. When an attempt is graded — by rules for objective items, by AI against a rubric for written and scenario answers — the points flow to those competencies, and each person's per-competency score is a rolling roll-up across everything they have taken.

That is what makes the Skill Passport possible: one profile per person, denominated in the same 29 competencies, with confidence growing as more evidence accumulates. Two candidates who took different assessments can still be compared on the competencies those assessments share.

Every competency has its own page (new, August 2026)

The framework is no longer only a single index page. Each of the 29 competencies now has its own published definition page in the Competency Dictionary, reached from the framework: a plain-language definition, what the competency looks like at each of the four scored bands, the observable signs it is missing, interview questions that surface real evidence rather than self-description, specific development moves, and the per-competency crosswalk to the five public frameworks.

Three worth starting with, because they are the ones organisations most often try to assess and most often measure badly: Decision Quality, which is judged by the reasoning available at the time rather than by how the decision turned out; Empowerment & Delegation, where the real test is what a person may decide without checking, not what tasks they were handed; and Self-Awareness, measured as the gap between how someone intends to land and how they actually do.

The wording of the four band anchors on those pages is the same wording a person receives in their own report. It is published deliberately: a manager should be able to read what a 62 means without needing a login, and a buyer should be able to inspect the interpretation layer before deciding whether to trust the score.

What the framework is dense in, what it is thin in, and what it does not cover at all

A capability framework is a set of choices about what to measure, and the choices are visible if you count. The AACF's 29 competencies are not spread evenly across its five domains: People & Influence holds ten of them, more than a third of the framework; Thinking & Judgment six; Self & Identity and Execution & Change five each; and Commercial & Client three. That distribution is a statement about what the framework is for. It is built to measure how someone works with and through other people, and it is comparatively thin where the question is commercial judgement.

It is worth knowing that before you adopt it. If you are hiring for a role whose difficulty is mostly interpersonal — a first-line manager, a client-facing consultant, a team lead — the framework has ten distinct competencies to separate candidates on. If the role's difficulty is mostly commercial, it has three, and you will want a second source of evidence rather than a finer reading of those three.

The larger limit is what is absent by design. The AACF contains no functional or technical competencies. There is no competency for writing SQL, closing a month-end, drafting a contract or configuring a network, and there will not be, because those are role-specific and go stale on a different clock from behaviour. What that means in practice is that the AACF is half of a hiring profile and not the whole of one: it tells you how a person operates, and something else has to tell you whether they can do the job's technical work. A vendor whose behavioural framework claims to cover both is describing something it is not.

What the framework does carry, per competency, is the interpretation layer rather than just the label: four written band anchors, three observable signs the competency is missing, three evidence prompts for an interviewer, and three development actions — 116 band anchors and 261 written prompts across the set, plus a crosswalk from every one of the 29 to all five public frameworks, which is 145 individual mappings with no gaps. The reason to count these out loud is that 'we have a competency framework' is a claim every platform makes, and the difference between frameworks is almost entirely in whether the layer under the label was written or merely promised.

Why a shared framework matters when choosing a platform

Without a framework, an assessment platform hands you a stack of unrelated test scores and leaves the interpretation to you. With one, every result lands in a common structure — so hiring screens, development diagnostics, and pre/post training measurement all speak the same language.

If you are evaluating platforms, ask three questions: does it have a published competency model you can inspect (AssessAll's is public), is that model mapped to a framework you already use, and do results actually roll up per competency across assessments rather than living per test?