By Cedric Paillard and Captain Andy O’Shea, Amris Aviation
Why the Instructor Becomes the Decisive Variable
It is tempting to picture a training system as a machine whose output follows from its inputs: the syllabus, the simulator, the manuals, the cadet. On that picture the instructor is a component — necessary, but interchangeable.
In a competency-based system, the instructor is the decisive variable. Give two instructors the same syllabus, the same simulator, the same scenario and the same cadet, and they will not produce the same outcome, because almost everything that matters in Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBTA) turns on instructor judgement.
Look at what a competency-based session actually asks of the person running it. Beforehand, the instructor designs or adapts a scenario so the intended competencies are genuinely exercised — threats placed where they will provoke the behaviours to be observed, difficulty calibrated to the phase of training, manual-handling windows protected even inside a line-oriented flight. During the session, the instructor observes behaviour accurately and without pause: separating a knowledge lapse from a procedural one, catching the early drift in situation awareness before it hardens into a visible error, and holding back from intervening so soon that the learning is lost. Afterwards, the instructor grades that behaviour against a shared standard, writes evidence that will mean the same thing to a colleague who was never in the room, and — the hardest part — runs a debrief in which the cadet reaches their own analysis rather than being handed the verdict. Not one of these is mechanical. Each rests on skills that can themselves be learned, taught and assessed.
There is a second reason the instructor is decisive. In an evidence-led system, the instructor is not only a teacher but a measuring instrument. The grades and narratives an instructor produces feed a data loop that shapes remediation for the individual cadet and, in aggregate, drives changes to the curriculum itself. If instructors do not measure consistently — if the same performance earns a three from one and a two from another — the data is corrupted at the source, and every decision built on it downstream is unreliable. The reliability of the whole system therefore rests on the calibration of its instructors. That is why standardisation and concordance are not administrative overhead but a safety-critical function.
The Four Roles of the Modern Instructor
It helps to name the distinct roles the competency-based instructor now occupies, because much of the difficulty of the job comes from moving fluently between them, sometimes inside a single session.
The first is the instructor as designer. Long before a cadet enters the simulator, someone has decided what the session is for, which competencies it will develop, what threats and events it will contain, and where its difficulty sits within the arc of the course. In mature training organisations, much of this lives in a lesson-plan architecture — a paired set of documents in which an operational “draft session” timeline and a formal competency-based lesson plan describe the same session in two complementary ways. But a document is not a design. The instructor has to understand the intent behind it well enough to adapt it in the moment, when a cadet’s needs pull away from the plan.
The second is the instructor as teacher. CBTA does not abolish teaching; it changes when and how it happens. Direct instruction still has its place — there are things a cadet simply needs to be told or shown — but much of the learning in a competency-based session is meant to come through guided discovery, with the instructor coaching in context and making the distinctions that matter (knowledge versus procedure, automation strategy versus manual technique) explicit as they surface.
The third is the instructor as facilitator. This is the role most foreign to instructors raised in the manoeuvre-based tradition, and the one most strongly bound up with CBTA and EBT. Facilitation is a deliberate method: rather than telling the cadet what happened and what to fix, the instructor leads with questions, prompts the cadet to analyse their own performance, and supplies answers only once self-discovery has run out. Done well, it produces deeper and more durable learning, because the cadet builds the mental model themselves. Done badly, it collapses into a disguised lecture or an aimless chat.
The fourth is the instructor as assessor. Every competency-based session generates evidence, and capturing it falls to the instructor: observing behaviour, classifying it against the right competency, grading it on a common scale with defined behavioural anchors, and writing a narrative that links what was seen to its operational effect and to a concrete corrective action. This is the role where bias does its quiet damage, and where a shared method — observe, record, classify, then and only then assess — does most of the work of keeping assessment fair and reliable.
These four roles are not stages in a sequence. They interleave. Within a single debrief, an instructor may facilitate the cadet’s own analysis, step briefly into direct teaching to close a knowledge gap the cadet cannot close alone, and then complete an assessment record — all while holding the design intent of the next session in mind. Fluency across the four is what separates the competent instructor from the merely qualified one.